You want centralized but department‑specific IAM control. Which resource hierarchy approach should you use?

A single Organization with a Folder for each department is the recommended approach for centralized but department-specific IAM control. The Organization resource is the root node of the Google Cloud resource hierarchy, providing a central point for managing all resources and IAM policies across the entire company. Folders allow you to group projects and other folders, enabling you to apply IAM policies at the folder level that inherit down to all contained resources. This creates a clear separation of concerns for each department while maintaining overall organizational control. Multiple Organizations with multiple Folders or Multiple Organizations, one per department are generally not recommended as they complicate management and policy enforcement across the enterprise. A single Organization with multiple projects, each with a central owner, lacks the hierarchical structure to easily apply department-wide policies.