Help Center/ Organizations/ Service Overview/ What Is Organizations?
Updated on 2025-09-30 GMT+08:00

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 accounts, 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 placed directly under the root OU or 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 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 team, 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, the enterprise administrator can use the management account to create an organization and manage other accounts in the organization. The management account can be used to manage policies within the organization and enable trusted services for Organizations.

  • Member account

    An account you created in your organization or you invited to join your organization via the Organizations service. Each member account can be placed directly under the root OU or any OU.

  • Invitation

    The process of inviting other accounts to join your organization. Only the management account can invite other accounts. The invited accounts can join an organization only after they accept the invitation. The original accounting relationship (master-member association) of invited accounts will remain unchanged.

Policies

  • SCPs

    Service control policies (SCPs) are organizational policies that you can use to manage permissions in your organization. The management account can use SCPs 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 policies that can help you standardize tag management 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 the trusted services for Organizations, 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 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.