What Is Organizations?

Overview

The Organizations service helps you govern multiple accounts within your organization. It enables you to consolidate multiple Huawei Cloud accounts into a single organization so you can manage them all in one place. You can centrally manage policies in Organizations. This helps you better meet the security and compliance requirements of your business.

Organizations is a free service. You only need to pay for the cloud services or resources used in your accounts.

System Architecture

The system architecture of an organization consists of entities, policies, and trusted services.

Figure 1 Organizations system architecture

Entities

• Organization

  An entity that you create to manage multiple accounts. Each organization is composed of one management account, multiple member account, a root organizational unit (OU), and other OUs. An organization has exactly one management account along with several member accounts. You can organize the accounts in a hierarchical, tree-like structure with the root OU at the top and nested OUs under it. Each member account can be directly under the root OU or placed under one of the other OUs.

• Root OU

  Organizations automatically generates the root OU for you when you create an organization. The root OU is located at the top of the tree, and its branches represent other OUs and accounts reaching down.

• OU

  A container or grouping unit for member accounts. It can be understood as a department, a subsidiary, a project family, or the like, of your enterprise. An OU can also contain other OUs. Each OU can have exactly one parent OU, but a parent OU can have multiple child OUs or nested member accounts.

• Management account

  A standard Huawei Cloud account. With the Organizations service, you can use the management account to create an organization and manage OUs, accounts, and policies for the organization. You can also use the management account to manage policies within the organization and enable trusted services for Organizations.

• Member account

  An account you created or invited to join your organization via the Organizations service. Each member account is a standard HUAWEI ID or Huawei Cloud account and can be directly in the root OU or placed in one of the other OUs.

• Invitation

  The process of inviting other accounts to join your organization. Only the management account can issue invitations. The invited accounts can join an organization only after they accept the invitations. The billing of these accounts is not changed after they join the organization.

Policies

• Service control policies (SCPs)

  A type of organization policy that you can use to manage permissions in your organization. The management account can use SCP to limit the permissions that can be assigned to member accounts in an organization. You can attach an SCP to your organization, OUs, or member accounts. Any SCP attached to an organization or OU affects all the accounts within the organization or under the OU. For details, see Overview of an SCP.

• Tag policies

  Tag policies are a type of policy that can help you standardize tags across resources in your organization's accounts. You can attach tag policies to organizations, OUs, and member accounts. A tag policy is only applied to tagged resources and tags that are defined in that policy.

Trusted Services

• Trusted service

  A Huawei Cloud service that is entrusted by Organizations to provide organizational management capabilities. After you enable a Huawei Cloud service as a trusted service, the trusted service creates a service-linked agency in the member account. The agency allows the trusted service to execute the tasks that are described in the trusted service's documentation. The trusted service extends management capabilities across multiple accounts within your organization. For details about supported trusted services, see Trusted Services for Organizations.

• Delegated administrator account

  A member account that has special permissions in an organization. The management account of your organization can designate a member account to be a delegated administrator account for a trusted service. All the users in the delegated administrator account will have the organizational management capabilities.

Accessing Organizations

You can access Organizations using the management console or HTTPS-compliant application programming interfaces (APIs).

• Using the management console

  The management console is a web-based GUI where you can easily perform various operations. Log in to the management console, and choose Management & Governance > Organizations.

• Using APIs

  You can use APIs to integrate Organizations into a third-party system for secondary development. For detailed operations, see Organizations API Reference.