Styra is today introducing a better way for platform engineering teams to empower hundreds or thousands of developers and accelerate their infrastructure deployments, including the broadest policy library and infrastructure authorization toolset for Kubernetes, Terraform and CloudFormation.

Policy-based access management (PBAM) uses decoupled policy as code and a policy engine to provide real-time authorization decisions throughout the cloud-native ecosystem. This article presents an overview of policy-based access management, its benefits and implementation methods.

As AuthZ Becomes Mainstream, Policy as Code, Infrastructure as Code and Software Supply Chain Security Will Merge It’s the holiday season, which means it’s time for the greatest gift of all: next year’s predictions. Last year, we predicted that in 2022 security teams will embrace cloud-native tools to automate manual checks, that enterprises will increasingly shift on-prem resources into the cloud and that we’d see the emergence of a clear authorization market.

Enterprises cannot implement Zero Trust cybersecurity without real-time dynamic authorization and authentication for every access request. The principles of Zero Trust and Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practices help fill the gaps that traditional cybersecurity systems often create and ignore.

Identity and access management (IAM) is an integral part of security systems. Without proper authentication and authorization, it would be impossible to practice cybersecurity principles such as zero trust and least privilege. By now, most organizations have a firm grasp on the identity part of IAM, including concepts like multi-factor and token-based authentication.

Traditional or static authorization methods no longer meet the demands of today’s digital business environment. Data breaches are on the rise (a 23% increase in 2021, as per the Identity Theft Resource Center), forcing organizations to re-evaluate their security and compliance practices.

Setting employee controls for IT to manage is the biggest challenge to cloud-native expansion, according to 64% of the developers surveyed in our 2022 Cloud-Native Alignment report.

The Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a policy engine that brings the speed, reliability and flexibility of decoupled policy as code to a wide range of authorization use cases across the cloud-native ecosystem. OPA is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) graduated project and has become an industry-wide standard for authorization, with several leading enterprises implementing it in their business-critical cloud systems.