How we built Organizations to help enterprises manage Cloudflare at scale (opens in new tab)
Cloudflare’s new Organizations feature helps enterprises centrally manage users, policies, accounts, and analytics across multiple Cloudflare Accounts. It preserves least-privilege access by allowing teams to remain separated while giving designated organization administrators broader oversight. Initially available in public beta for enterprise customers, Organizations is designed to reduce administrative complexity without granting unauthorized access. ## Why Enterprises Use Multiple Accounts - Separate accounts help teams manage their own resources and limit permissions. - Fine-grained RBAC can still be cumbersome when administrators must enumerate individual resources. - Central administrators currently need access to every account for reporting and policy management. - This setup is fragile because account-level administrators can remove those central administrators. ## Organization Structure and Account Management - Organizations add a management layer above individual Cloudflare Accounts. - The core feature is a flat list of accounts onboarded into the organization. - An account can be added only by someone who is a Super Administrator for that account. - Organizations are built on Cloudflare’s existing Tenant system, originally developed for partners. ## Organization Super Administrators - Org Super Administrators have Super Administrator permissions across every account in the organization. - They do not need memberships in child accounts and do not appear in account-level user interfaces. - The new role is the first of several planned organization-level roles. - Cloudflare consolidated legacy authorization paths into domain-scoped roles. - The permissions overhaul added approximately 133,000 lines of code and removed 32,000. - Permission checks for enumeration endpoints such as `/accounts` and `/zones` became 27% faster, especially for users with access to thousands of accounts. ## Organization-Wide Analytics - Org Super Administrators can view aggregated HTTP traffic analytics. - The dashboard combines data across all accounts and zones in the organization. - Cloudflare plans to add analytics for additional products over time. ## Shared Configurations - Organizations allow centrally managed policy sets to be shared across accounts. - Initial examples include WAF and Gateway policies. - Authorized users in the source account can update shared policies for the broader enterprise. - Security analysts can therefore manage enterprise-wide WAF rules without becoming organization or account administrators everywhere. ## Roadmap and Availability - The beta initially targets enterprise customers. - Cloudflare plans to expand access to pay-as-you-go and other customers, followed by the partner ecosystem. - Planned capabilities include: - Organization-level audit logs - Billing reports - More analytics dashboards - Additional organization user roles - Self-service account creation ## Security-First Rollout - Cloudflare will not automatically create organizations through account backfilling. - A self-service invitation process ensures that no user gains access without approval from a relevant Super Administrator. - The first eligible Super Administrator to claim the company’s organization can add other accounts where they also hold Super Administrator access. - If another employee has already claimed the organization, administrators must coordinate invitations or account-level approval. - Cloudflare Support will not configure organizations on customers’ behalf. Enterprise customers can claim an organization from the Cloudflare Dashboard’s Organizations tab at no additional cost. Companies should coordinate internally with their Super Administrators to ensure all relevant accounts are added securely.
