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Best practices for enterprises

Learn GitHub-recommended practices for your enterprise.

Assign multiple owners

If an enterprise only has one owner, the enterprise's resources can become inaccessible if the owner is unreachable. To protect access to your resources, we recommend that at least two people within the enterprise have the owner role. For more information, see "Inviting people to manage your enterprise."

Use policies

We recommend using policies to enforce business rules and regulatory compliance.

Each enterprise policy controls the options available for a policy at the organization level. You can choose to not enforce a policy, which allows organization owners to configure the policy for the organization, or you can choose from a set of options to enforce for all organizations owned by your enterprise. For more information, see "About enterprise policies."

Minimize the number of organizations

Most businesses are best served by a single organization. Some enterprises may need multiple organizations for compliance or security reasons, but try to create as few as possible. A smaller number of organizations encourages innersource practice, allows discussions to involve a wider audience, and reduces administrative overhead.

For more guidance on how many organizations to create and how to structure them, see "Best practices for structuring organizations in your enterprise."

Avoid extensive collaboration in user-owned repositories

We recommend collaborating in organization-owned repositories whenever possible and minimizing collaboration in user-owned repositories. Organization-owned repositories have more sophisticated security and administrative features, and they remain accessible even as enterprise membership changes.

Use human-readable usernames

Use human-readable usernames, and avoid machine-generated IDs that are difficult for humans to read.

You can manage the display of usernames within your enterprise's private repositories. For more information, see "Managing the display of member names in your organization."

Further reading