The role of organizations
Organizations are a powerful feature that allow you to create separate entities for your assets and control what users can do with the organizational data. In runZero, you can use organizations to group and manage asset data, Explorers, tasks, sites, and scan configurations. The flexibility of organizations allows you to segment your data by company, department, customers, or however you like. For example, you might want to set up different organizations for each environment you have – such as development and production – because you want to segment the data. Or if you’re a service provider, you may have an organization for each one of your customers. In some cases, your business may want to set up multiple organizations to manage asset data as well as streamline permissions management. Imagine having to review and assign organizational access for each user. That’s time-consuming and prone to user error. So how can you ensure consistent provisioning of user permissions throughout your organizations?Introducing organizational hierarchies
runZero 3.6 introduces organizational hierarchies, which enables you to create parent-child relationships between organizations. This approach is based on a top-down permissions distribution model, where the child organizations inherit the permissions configured within the parent organization.
Mom Org
that has a child organization called Baby Org
. Within Mom Org
, a user named Chris has been assigned an administrator role. As a result, Chris can access the Baby Org
organization as an administrator.
Let’s take a look at how you can set up organizational hierarchies in runZero.
How to set up organizational hierarchies in runZero
To set up an organizational hierarchy, you can either create a new organization or modify an existing one. You can always edit your organizations and assign a new parent (or no parent at all). Here’s how you can assign a parent organization:- Create a new organization or edit an existing organization.
- Make sure to provide a name and description for the organization. This information captures context about the organization and the type of data it contains.
- Make sure to set any expiration dates for stale assets, offline assets, and scan data. This determines how long these data types are stored by runZero.
- Under parent settings:
- If you want to add the organization under a parent organization, choose an organization to assign as the parent. You can choose a child organization to be a parent as well – runZero supports up to three levels of nesting.
- If you don’t want to assign a parent to the organization, choose
None
. You can add child organizations later, if needed.
- Save your organization.


How to view user permissions
To see what a user’s permissions look like, you can view a user’s details to see their role for each organization.- Go to your Users page and click the name of the user whose permissions you want to view.
- The user details page shows a table that contains all of the organizations that the user has access to and the role that they are assigned.

Assigned role
column, then it was explicitly configured for the user. If the role is listed in the Inherited role
column, then the permissions were set by the default role or parent organization. The higher level of the two columns will be the effective access that the user has to that organization.
Simplify the complexities of user access management with organizational hierarchies
As your business continues to grow and scale, so does the need for control over complexity. To protect and secure your data, you need to have the right systems and measures in place for effective user access management. Once you have solid RBAC practices in place, you can add extra layers of protection, such as organizational hierarchies, to ensure that the right roles are being propagated to users. Ready to get a stronger handle on user and permission management in runZero? Try out organizational hierarchies today.About Version 2 Limited
Version 2 Limited is one of the most dynamic IT companies in Asia. The company develops and distributes IT products for Internet and IP-based networks, including communication systems, Internet software, security, network, and media products. Through an extensive network of channels, point of sales, resellers, and partnership companies, Version 2 Limited offers quality products and services which are highly acclaimed in the market. Its customers cover a wide spectrum which include Global 1000 enterprises, regional listed companies, public utilities, Government, a vast number of successful SMEs, and consumers in various Asian cities.
About runZero
runZero, a network discovery and asset inventory solution, was founded in 2018 by HD Moore, the creator of Metasploit. HD envisioned a modern active discovery solution that could find and identify everything on a network–without credentials. As a security researcher and penetration tester, he often employed benign ways to get information leaks and piece them together to build device profiles. Eventually, this work led him to leverage applied research and the discovery techniques developed for security and penetration testing to create runZero.