What Is the Best Organizational Structure for My AWS Account?

For web development, whether personal or professional, and the services offered by cloud providers like AWS, it is best to define and maintain a secure and functional structure, which will provide security and efficiency in the cloud computing area.

"With order and time, one finds the secret of doing everything, and doing it well"

Pythagoras

In this blog we offer what inC4C7OPS we consider as best practices in the organizational process of cloud computing.

Our goal will be to create an organization (in this case, 'production') with an account independent from its main user.

First, we will type 'Organizations' in the search bar at the top of the AWS console's initial view, and click on the 'AWS Organizations' option.

In the new window, we will observe two possible cases:

1. If you have not previously created an organization, you will have to click the 'Create an organization' button, to place yourself at the point of creating an organizational unit.

2. Otherwise, if you have already created an organization, you will see the following window, which allows the creation of accounts and organizations.

Now you must click on the organization that will be the parent of the organizational unit, in this situation we will select 'Root' and subsequently'Organizational unit' > 'Create new'

This will take us to a new window, where we can create our organization

• In the ‘Organizational unit name’ field, we will write the name we want to give our organization, in this case ‘production’

Then we will click the ‘Create organizational unit’ button

We can observe two results

• The organizational unit was created as a dependent (according to the tree) of the ‘Root’ organization as we defined from the beginning
• The unit has no associated resources, this means it doesn't have an ‘AWS account’ or ‘AWS organizational unit’ assigned to it

Now we will create an 'AWS account' in order to link it to the new organization established previously. To do this, we will click on 'Add an AWS account'

In the view we get, we keep the 'Create an AWS account' option selected by default:

• For the 'AWS account name' field, we suggest writing the same name as the created organization, in this case 'production'
• 'Email address of the account's owner', this field must contain the email that will be associated with the account. This email can be an alias (as Gmail allows); the important thing is that the email is valid
• 'IAM role name', we will leave this as offered by default, with the value 'OrganizationAccountAccessRole'

To finish, we click on 'Create AWS account'

This process may take a couple of minutes, we will observe the following notifications at the top of the console, to view the creation process you can click on ‘View all pending creation requests’

After creating the account, we can observe it in the organizational structure. It is located at the first level within 'Root'. This is because all accounts we register will be directly dependent on the root organization.

The above is not an issue, as we will move the account to where we need it; in this case, we are moving it from 'Root' to 'production'. To accomplish this,

• We must select the account
• We click on 'Actions' > 'AWS account' > 'Move'

We specify the organization that will contain the account (production) and click 'Move AWS account'

We can validate the correct result by deploying what is contained by our 'production' organizational unit. Furthermore, we now know that the created records can be moved and changed, so if a modification is required in the future, it can be done without any issues.

We have concluded this blog with the objective of supporting and sharing the optimal way in which C4C7OPS approaches the management of its accounts in the AWS console, in addition to presenting its organizational structure more effectively.

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Why a Multi-Account Strategy Matters in AWS

A well-designed AWS account structure is not just an organizational preference — it is a security boundary. By separating workloads into distinct accounts under AWS Organizations, you limit the blast radius of misconfigurations, isolate billing and quotas per environment, and enforce least-privilege access through Service Control Policies (SCPs) at the organizational unit level.

Codifly recommends at minimum three accounts: a management (root) account used exclusively for billing and org administration, a shared-services or sandbox account for experimentation, and dedicated production and staging accounts nested under environment-specific OUs. This foundation scales cleanly as teams and projects grow.

1. 1Create your management accountStart from your root AWS account and enable AWS Organizations. This account should never host workloads — use it only for org management, consolidated billing, and root-level SCPs.
2. 2Define Organizational Units (OUs)Create at least three OUs: Production, Staging, and Sandbox. Attach SCPs to each OU to restrict allowed services and regions per environment.
3. 3Provision member accountsInvite or create new AWS accounts for each OU. Assign a dedicated IAM Identity Center (SSO) user or role to each account rather than sharing root credentials.
4. 4Apply guardrails with SCPs and taggingUse Service Control Policies to enforce mandatory tagging, region restrictions, and deny destructive actions (e.g., s3:DeleteBucket) in production. Tagging policies ensure cost allocation and governance from day one.