Primer on Modern Authorization Platforms

The Backstory

Business Challenges

The modern organization is facing numerous challenges as it looks to enable a highly distributed and often complex workforce of full time, contractor and third party workers, whilst simultaneously engaging an ever growing external user community of online customers and consumers of information.

Evolving Technology Landscape

Technology changes - new problems emerge which existing infrastructure and tooling can no longer solve - and existing solutions incrementally and radically innovate - which allows existing problems to be solved faster, cheaper and with less effort.

Today’s enterprise needs to leverage, integrate and consume services from a range of cloud providers, build services and applications using APIs, microservices and existing infrastructure while upholding privacy and security controls for various different data types.

Siloed identity, application delivery and protection mechanisms can no longer deliver the capabilities needed to allow for business growth, agility and competitiveness.

Externalizing Authorization

Authorization - the ability to define and enforce who has access to what - has typically been the forgotten gambit of the AAA triad (with Authentication and Accounting being the remaining two) - with access control logic taking second place behind how user’s login. Any access control service that did exist, was often tightly coupled inside an application or perhaps supplied via a coarse grained model as part of the single sign on and session management platform.