Most teams pick their multi-account governance model the wrong way. They evaluate AWS Control Tower against a custom landing zone based on setup speed, then discover the real trade-offs six months later when they are trying to enforce a compliance requirement that neither model handles cleanly out of the box. The decision is not "fast vs. flexible." It is about where your governance ceiling sits relative to where your organization will be in 18 months. Getting this wrong means rebuilding your account structure mid-growth, which costs more in engineering time than getting it right the first time. What AWS Control Tower Actually Gives You Control Tower is a managed governance layer built on top of AWS Organizations. When you enable it, you get four things immediately: a pre-configured OU hierarchy, a management account with consolidated billing, a log archive account for centralized CloudTrail and Config storage, and an audit account for security tooling. The guardrails come in two types.…