Managing sandboxes in AWS is hard —Noventiq can change that

In every modern cloud-driven organization, innovation depends on experimentation. Developers, architects, and data teams constantly need safe spaces to build, test, and break things—without putting production workloads or budgets at risk. Especially now in the AI-era. In theory, AWS makes this easy. In practice, creating and governing sandboxes across an enterprise AWS environment is far more complex than it appears.

This is exactly where Sandbox Studio, integrated directly into your AWS Landing Zone, becomes a game-changer.

The hidden complexity of AWS sandboxes

Spinning up a sandbox isn’t the problem—governance is

Anyone can deploy a new AWS account or environment, but the real difficulty lies in ensuring every sandbox adheres to essential enterprise guardrails such as network boundaries, identity and access management, cost controls, data protection standards, logging and observability requirements, and compliance frameworks like CIS, ISO, or NIST. Without automation, applying these controls consistently across dozens—or even hundreds—of sandbox environments becomes challenging.

Sandboxes often turn into “shadow IT” inside your AWS account

A short-term test environment can quickly grow into a collection of orphaned resources, untagged workloads, uncontrolled spending, unknown data flows, and drift from established security policies, ultimately causing teams to lose visibility into who created the environment, why it exists, and whether it remains safe or compliant.

Manual lifecycle management is operationally expensive

Each sandbox must go through request intake, provisioning, access and resource configuration, cost monitoring, and eventual cleanup or decommissioning, and when these steps are handled even semi-manually, the cloud team quickly becomes a bottleneck, ultimately slowing down innovation across the organization.

Standard AWS tools solve pieces of the puzzle, not the whole thing

Although AWS Organizations, Control Tower, Service Catalog, and IAM Identity Center are powerful tools, integrating them into a fully functional, enterprise-grade sandbox management platform demands extensive custom automation, pipelines, policy-as-code, cross-account governance, and continuous maintenance—ultimately turning the solution into a full-fledged product that most IT teams lack the appetite or capacity to build or sustain.

Introducing Sandbox Studio and Noventiq

Sandbox Studio designed specifically to remove these complexities and bring fully governed, self-service sandboxes into your AWS Landing Zone, enabling innovation at pace.

What makes Sandbox Studio different?

• Seamless integration with your Landing Zone - Sandbox Studio sits on top of your existing AWS foundation—Control Tower, Organizations, or a custom LZ—and extends it with automated, policy-driven sandbox environments.
• Self-service with built-in guardrails - Users request sandboxes through the Sandbox Studio web UI. Behind the scenes, security, compliance, and cost controls are automatically enforced at the account level. No manual intervention, no custom scripting.
• Pre-approved templates defined once and deployed at scale - Teams can choose from curated sandbox account blueprints-aligned with enterprise standards and corporate compliance and regulation. All deployed consistently, with AWS resources pre-configured.
• Automated lifecycle management - Every sandbox has a defined owner, an expiration date, budget and cleanup workflows. Automations and alerts keeps the environment compliant and prevents cloud and cost sprawl.
• Compliance from day one - Sandbox Studio inherits your existing AWS landing zone guardrails, including SCPs, IAM permission sets, network controls, and budgets, ensuring every sandbox stays aligned with your governance and security baseline. Your security posture stays intact, even when developers move fast.

Faster Innovation, Lower Risk, and More Control

The collaboration unlocks high-value use-cases across Financial Services, Public Sector, Higher Education, and enterprise engineering teams - from secure AI experimentation and research sandboxes to controlled modernisation pilots, cloud skills uplift, and large-scale innovation programs that accelerate AWS adoption.

Enterprises adopt AWS to accelerate business innovation, but without proper guardrails and automation, sandbox environments can introduce unnecessary risk, complexity, and cost. Sandbox Studio and Noventiq ensure that sandboxes are compliant by default, governed through automation, easy for developers and business users, controlled for IT teams, and cost-controlled for finance. This transforms sandboxing from a challenge into a competitive advantage and elevates the Landing Zone into a modern cloud operating platform. To explore how this solution can strengthen your cloud governance and unlock faster, safer innovation, take a look at the Sandbox Studio offering available on the AWS Marketplace: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-3z3kwjewzsilq . 

Book a meeting with us here to learn more.