Cascade Regional Airlines' compliance officer wants the Kiosk-Ops subscription to inherit governance from both the Outstations management group and the Finance management group at the same time, and attempts to place Kiosk-Ops as a child of both. Is this possible in Azure's management group hierarchy?

Azure's management group hierarchy is strictly a tree structure: every management group and every subscription has exactly one parent, forming a single unambiguous inheritance path from any given subscription up to the root management group. This design exists so that policy and RBAC inheritance stays deterministic, at any point in time there is exactly one chain of ancestor scopes contributing assignments, with no possibility of two conflicting inheritance paths merging together. Allowing two parents simultaneously would break that determinism, since Azure would have no rule for combining or prioritizing assignments from two unrelated branches. Restricting the idea to same-level management groups doesn't change the limitation, since it concerns the number of parents, one, not their relative level. Azure Policy exemptions serve a different purpose entirely: they excuse a scope from a specific policy it would otherwise inherit; they cannot attach a subscription to a second management group. An organization that genuinely needs governance from both branches should assign the relevant policies and roles directly at Kiosk-Ops, or restructure the hierarchy so shared requirements live in a common ancestor above both. Confirm the current single parent in the Management Groups blade of the Azure portal.