The account structure design strategy is the start of it all, and each company will have different requirements for how they will want to set up their accounts. For smaller companies that will have just a few workloads running in the cloud, a single account may be sufficient. As the size and complexity of an organization grows, it is common to have many accounts that allow for desecrate billing, the separation of duties, a reduced blast radius, and the specialization of environment or governance requirements. Using a hierarchical structure, where there is a master account and many sub-accounts, is common. This will give limited visibility across accounts but still keep the ability to federate certain aspects, such as security, networking, and environment workloads.

Often, the top master account is used exclusively for billing and cost aggregation. This will enable a single pane of glass for the billing, but have that broken down into the sub-accounts for charging back, or simply an understanding of which activities are costing the most. It often has the ability to allow for cost optimization across billing constructs as well, supporting volume discount pricing or reserved capacity spreading. The sub or children accounts are usually made up of the individual requirements. Regardless of company requirements, it is important to understand the cloud account strategy early on so as to ensure that it is properly aligned with the needs of stakeholders.