AWS Organizations Cheat Sheet

• AWS Organizations is a management service that lets you centrally govern multiple AWS accounts. It supports policy-based controls, consolidated billing, hierarchical grouping of accounts, and organization-wide governance.

  Key terms:

  • Organization — A collection of AWS accounts managed centrally.

  • Management Account — The main account that creates and administers the organization; acts as the payer account.

  • Member Account — Any account (besides the management account) that is part of an organization.

  • Administrative Root — The top container in your organization’s hierarchy; all OUs and accounts fall beneath it.

  • Organizational Unit (OU) — A logical grouping of accounts; can contain nested OUs.

  • Policy — A JSON-based document defining controls applied across accounts or OUs.

  • Service Control Policy (SCP) — Organization-wide permission filter that defines which services/actions are allowed.

Features

1. Centralized Account Management

• Create new AWS accounts or invite existing ones into an organization.

• Organize accounts into Organizational Units (OUs) inside a hierarchical structure (up to 5 levels deep).

2. Consolidated Billing

• One payment method for all accounts.

• Combined view of all charges.

• Access to aggregated volume discounts (e.g., EC2, S3).

3. Policy-Based Governance

• Apply Service Control Policies (SCPs) to the organization, OUs, or individual accounts.

• SCPs filter allowed actions but do not grant permissions.

• Policies are inherited through the hierarchy.

4. Hierarchical Grouping

• Root → OUs → Nested OUs → Accounts.

• Reflect your company structure for clean administration.

5. Tagging & ABAC

• Attach tags to OUs, the root, and policies.

• Enables Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) across your organization.

6. Eventually Consistent

High availability through data replication across AWS data centers.

Use Cases 

A. Multi-Account Best Practice Management

• Separate environments (Dev / Test / Prod).

• Isolate workloads for security and blast-radius reduction.

• Manage departments or business units independently.

B. Central Governance

• Apply mandatory policies organization-wide:

  • Restrict unapproved AWS regions

  • Prevent disabling CloudTrail

  • Require encryption or logging

• Ensure compliance across all accounts.

C. Financial Control

• Centralize cost tracking.

• Allocate budgets per OU or team.

• Leverage discounted pricing through aggregated usage.

D. Lifecycle Management

• Automatically create and manage accounts for new teams, apps, or environments.

Administrative Actions in Organizations

• Create an AWS account and add it to your organization, or add an existing AWS account to your organization.
• Organize your AWS accounts into groups called organizational units (OUs).
• Organize your OUs into a hierarchy that reflects your company’s structure.
• Centrally manage and attach policies to the entire organization, OUs, or individual AWS accounts.

Concepts

• An organization is a collection of AWS accounts that you can organize into a hierarchy and manage centrally.
• A management account is the AWS account you use to create your organization. You cannot change which account in your organization is the management account.
  • From the management account, you can create other accounts in your organization, invite and manage invitations for other accounts to join your organization, and remove accounts from your organization.
  • You can also attach policies to entities such as administrative roots, organizational units (OUs), or accounts within your organization.
  • The management account has the role of a payer account and is responsible for paying all charges accrued by the accounts in its organization.
• A member account is an AWS account, other than the management account, that is part of an organization. A member account can belong to only one organization at a time. The management account has the responsibilities of a payer account and is responsible for paying all charges that are accrued by the member accounts.
• An administrative root is the starting point for organizing your AWS accounts. The administrative root is the top-most container in your organization’s hierarchy. Under this root, you can create OUs to logically group your accounts and organize these OUs into a hierarchy that best matches your business needs.
• An organizational unit (OU) is a group of AWS accounts within an organization. An OU can also contain other OUs enabling you to create a hierarchy.
• A policy is a “document” with one or more statements that define the controls that you want to apply to a group of AWS accounts.
  • Service control policy (SCP) is a policy that specifies the services and actions that users and roles can use in the accounts that the SCP affects. SCPs are similar to IAM permission policies except that they don’t grant any permissions. Instead, SCPs are filters that allow only the specified services and actions to be used in affected accounts.

• AWS Organizations has two available feature sets:
  • All organizations support consolidated billing, which provides basic management tools that you can use to centrally manage the accounts in your organization.
  • If you enable all features, you continue to get all the consolidated billing features plus a set of advanced features such as service control policies.

• You can remove an AWS account from an organization and make it into a standalone account.
• Organization Hierarchy
  • Including root and AWS accounts created in the lowest OUs, your hierarchy can be five levels deep.
  • Policies inherited through hierarchical connections in an organization.
  • Policies can be assigned at different points in the hierarchy.
• You can attach tags, or user-defined attributes, to Organizational Units, the organization’s root, and policies. These tags let you implement attribute-based access control (ABAC). ABAC is an authorization strategy that defines permissions based on tags attached to users and AWS resources.

Security

A. Service Control Policies (SCPs)

• Enforce organization-wide restrictions.

• Limit IAM permissions for all identities in an account.

• Prevent usage of disallowed services or operations.

• Guarantee global security requirements (e.g., MFA, encryption).

B. Permissions Boundary

• SCPs act as the outer boundary.

• IAM policies cannot exceed SCP restrictions.

C. Account Roles

• Management account:

  • Full administrative authority

  • Pays all bills

• Member accounts:

  • Controlled through SCPs

  • Belong to only one organization at a time

D. Tag-Based Authorization

• Apply ABAC to control access using tags on:

  • Accounts

  • OUs

  • Users

  • Policies

AWS Organizations Pricing

• This service is free.

Managing Multi-Account AWS Environments Using AWS Organizations:

Note: If you are studying for the AWS Certified Security Specialty exam, we highly recommend that you take our AWS Certified Security – Specialty Practice Exams and read our Security Specialty exam study guide.

Validate Your Knowledge

Question 1

A company requires corporate IT governance and cost oversight of all of its AWS resources across its divisions around the world. Their corporate divisions want to maintain administrative control of the discrete AWS resources they consume and ensure that those resources are separate from other divisions.

Which of the following options will support the autonomy of each corporate division while enabling the corporate IT to maintain governance and cost oversight? (Select TWO.)

1. Use AWS Trusted Advisor and AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor
2. Enable IAM cross-account access for all corporate IT administrators in each child account.
3. Create separate VPCs for each division within the corporate IT AWS account. Launch an AWS Transit Gateway with equal-cost multipath routing  (ECMP) and VPN tunnels for intra-VPC communication.
4. Use AWS Consolidated Billing by creating AWS Organizations to link the divisions’ accounts to a parent corporate account.
5. Create separate Availability Zones for each division within the corporate IT AWS account. Improve communication between the two AZs using the AWS Global Accelerator.

Question 2

A multinational manufacturing company has multiple AWS accounts in multiple AWS regions across North America, Europe, and Asia. The solutions architect has been tasked to set up AWS Organizations to centrally manage policies and have full administrative control across the multiple AWS accounts owned by the company.

Which of the following options is the recommended implementation to achieve this requirement with the LEAST effort?

1. Set up AWS Organizations by establishing cross-account access from the master account to all member AWS accounts of the company. The master account will automatically have full administrative control across all member accounts.
2. Set up AWS Organizations by sending an invitation to the master account of your organization from each of the member accounts of the company. Create an OrganizationAccountAccessRole IAM role in the member account and grant permission to the master account to assume the role.
3. Use AWS Control Tower from the master account and enroll all the member AWS accounts of the company. AWS Control Tower will automatically provision the needed IAM permissions to have full administrative control across all member accounts.
4. Set up AWS Organizations by sending an invitation to all member accounts of the company from the master account of your organization. Create an OrganizationAccountAccessRole IAM role in the member account and grant permission to the master account to assume the role.

For more AWS practice exam questions with detailed explanations, visit the Tutorials Dojo Portal:

AWS Organizations Cheat Sheet References:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/
https://aws.amazon.com/organizations/features/
https://aws.amazon.com/organizations/faqs/