News

Projects with internal and external participants

Several people often work together on cloud projects. However, sharing user accounts involves various risks and dangers. This is why many cloudscale.ch users work in what are known as "organizations" that represent, for example, a company or department. All organization members have personal login credentials and can enable two-factor authentication (2FA) for their user account. The organization's superusers determine which organization members and external collaborators are authorized to access which of the organization's projects.

A second company or other organization is often also involved when external participants are associated with a project. This is where the new "partner organizations" feature comes into its own: you can grant a partner organization the right to include the appropriate employees for the project independently, without you having to know details about who exactly has the required know-how or desired availability. Every time you share a project, you decide whether the partner organization should only have read access or whether it is given change permissions, too.

Partner organizations: delegate administrative tasks

Partner organization management can be found in the "Organizations" area of our cloud control panel. This is where you can initiate new partnerships as well as check and, if necessary, terminate existing ones. A partnership documents that two organizations know each other; it works both ways and, on its own, does not imply any kind of access rights to the other partner's projects or cloud resources.

As easily as you can add organization members, teams and external collaborators, you can now add partner organizations to your projects. This means that you allow the superusers of the partner organization in question to grant access rights to these projects to their own organization members and external collaborators. These access rights are limited to the access level you grant to the partner for the project in question. External superusers cannot, however, change (or even see) the rights granted to your organization members and external collaborators; you retain sole control of this.

Conversely, if a partner organization has shared one of its projects with your organization, you can add your own organization members, teams and external collaborators to this project as usual. NB: further delegation is not possible. Only the organization that owns the project can add partner organizations to it.

Well thought-out details for every scenario

As is the case for external collaborators, the internal details of your organization remain concealed from individuals in your partner organizations. The latter can only see those projects you share with them, but not other internal structures such as projects, teams, or potential further partner organizations. It is only in the case of changes that the acting account is visible in the corresponding project log, which ensures adherence to possible compliance specifications. It goes without saying that you can remove partner organizations from your projects at any time; all access rights associated with them will expire with immediate effect. Once you have withdrawn access rights, also check any API tokens in the affected projects as some of them may no longer be required.

The "partner organizations" feature is typically used when you need the active contribution of partners (such as customers or service providers) in your projects or when you would like to increase transparency and grant read access to your end customers. However, this is not only for corporate settings, as you can also use organizations and partnerships for associations, with your friends, and anywhere else that you work on a cloud project with different groups.

By the way, in addition to email/password and GitHub, we also support your own "OpenID Connect"-compatible identity provider, such as Keycloak or ZITADEL, for logging into our cloud control panel. The choice is completely yours; it is not necessary for all users to employ the same login mechanism for successful collaboration with partner organizations.

Partner organizations complete our feature set relating to collaboration. In addition to your own organization members and individual external collaborators, you can now also replicate partnerships at an institutional level in our cloud control panel. With every partner determining which of their organization members are the best match in the current phase, your project benefits to the greatest possible degree from the expertise and availability of everyone involved. And at the same time, you also minimize your administrative overheads.

Your partner in every scenario,
Your cloudscale.ch team