3.4 Organizations and Business Groups

An organization represents a tenant for which you are providing Cloud services. A business group is a subunit within the organization for which business services are deployed. An organization must have at least one business group. Typically, an organization represents a company and business groups represent the departments or cost centers that need to deploy business services.

To provide organizations with the resources needed to deploy business services, resource groups and workload templates are assigned to organizations. In the illustration above, two resource groups (RG1 and RG2) and three workload templates (Windows Server 2008 64-bit, Windows Server 2008 32-bit, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 64-bit) are assigned to the NetIQ organization.

Because an organization’s business groups might not need access to the same resources and workload templates, the organization’s resources and workload templates must be assigned to the business units. In the above illustration, the organization has two business groups (Research and Web Services). Both resource groups and all three workload templates are assigned to the Web Services business group to be used for its business services, but only one resource group and two templates are assigned to the Research business group for its business services.

Users are added as organization members and given roles within the organization. A role provides rights to perform specific activities, such as deploying business services or managing the organization’s membership. In the above illustration, both Juliet J and Anne C have the Business Service Owner role for the organization. This allows them to create business services for both the Research and Web Services business groups. It is also possible to assign a user a role at the business group level rather than at the organization level. For example, if Juliet J was assigned the Business Service Owner role for the Research business group rather than for the organization, she could create business services only for the Research business group.