The Organization Policy Service gives you centralized and programmatic control over your organization’s Google Cloud resources through constraints that apply across the entire resource hierarchy.
What is the Organization Policy Service?
As the organization policy administrator, you use the Organization Policy Service to configure constraints across your entire resource hierarchy. Per the documentation, this centralizes control over how your organization’s resources can be used, establishes guardrails for your development teams to stay within compliance boundaries, and helps project owners and their teams move quickly without fear of breaking compliance.
The key difference from Identity and Access Management: IAM governs who, the Organization Policy Service governs what. IAM authorizes who can take action on specific resources; the Organization Policy Service determines how resources can be configured.
Core Features
- Constraints: Blueprints that define which behaviors of a Google Cloud service are controlled
- Organization policies: Enforce a constraint on an organization, folder, or project and contain one or more rules
- Conditional rules: A policy can contain one rule that enforces the constraint only on tagged resources and another that prevents enforcement on other resources
- Inheritance: Descendants of the resource the policy is attached to inherit it by default
- Custom constraints: Organization-managed restrictions on resource creation and updates
Typical Use Cases
Limiting sharing to your own domain
Restricting resource sharing based on domain, so resources are not shared with identities outside your organization.
Restricting service account usage
Limiting the use of IAM service accounts to reduce uncontrolled use of long-lived credentials.
Restricting where new resources are created
Restricting the physical location of newly created resources - relevant for data residency requirements in the DACH region.
Custom guardrails through custom constraints
Expressing company-specific requirements as custom constraints when no suitable Google-managed constraint exists.
Benefits
- Free of charge: All use of the Organization Policy Service API is free of charge per the official pricing page
- Central control: A policy at the organization level applies across the entire hierarchy
- Complement to IAM: Configuration boundaries in addition to permission grants
- Extensible: Custom constraints for requirements the existing constraints do not cover
Integration with innFactory
As a certified Google Cloud partner, innFactory supports you in designing and rolling out organization policies: selecting suitable constraints, expressing compliance requirements as custom constraints, and aligning them with your resource hierarchy.
Contact us for a consultation on the Organization Policy Service.
Available Tiers & Options
Standard
- Free use of the API
- Policy inheritance across the entire resource hierarchy
- Google-managed constraints plus custom constraints
- Policies act on how resources are configured, not on the permissions of individual identities
Typical Use Cases
Technical Specifications
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Organization Policy Service?
The Organization Policy Service gives you centralized and programmatic control over your organization's Google Cloud resources. As the organization policy administrator, you configure constraints across your entire resource hierarchy.
What is the difference from IAM?
Identity and Access Management focuses on who, and lets the administrator authorize who can take action on specific resources based on permissions. Organization Policy focuses on what, and lets the administrator set restrictions on specific resources to determine how they can be configured.
What are constraints and custom constraints?
A constraint is a particular type of restriction against a Google Cloud service or a list of services - think of it as a blueprint that defines what behaviors are controlled. Custom constraints are organization-managed restrictions that allow or restrict resource creation and updates.
How does inheritance work?
When a policy is attached to a resource, all descendants of that resource inherit the organization policy by default. By applying a policy to the organization resource, the administrator can control enforcement organization-wide.
What does the Organization Policy Service cost?
According to the official pricing page, all use of the Organization Policy Service API is free of charge. Costs arise only from the Google Cloud resources you actually use.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of Google Cloud (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by Google Cloud.
