System administrators create organizations and organization administrators, and establish certain organization policies. Organization administrators populate their organization with users and groups, create and assign roles, and can update most organization policies and properties.

A cloud can contain one or more organizations. Each organization is a unit of administration for a collection of users, groups, and computing resources. Users authenticate at the organization level, supplying credentials established when the user was created or imported. User credentials are authenticated by the organization's identity provider. vCloud Director includes an integrated identity provider. It also supports several standards-based external identity providers.