During the last 3 years we have seen a significant uptake on decoupled authorizations solutions, the main drivers behind this is a move to the cloud, micros services and ZT implementations. In this speech Gustaf Kaijser will walk you through the feedback he has been getting from the organisations that have implemented OPA based solutions the last years, and the significant gains that they have seen in:
The adoption of multiple clouds is accelerating across all industries. While multi-cloud brings many benefits, it also results in new challenges. Organizations must manage platform-specific access policies in the bespoke policy syntax of each cloud.
Security and risk gaps arise between cloud identity systems due to the increased policy fragmentation and technical complexity that can obscure visibility and make it difficult to determine who has access to what.
These challenges grow exponentially when you consider the various access policies (and system languages) associated with each data, network, and platform layer (and vendor) in an organization’s tech stack.
This session will describe an open-source solution to multi-cloud access policy fragmentation: Identity Query Language (IDQL) and Hexa Orchestration. IDQL and Hexa are two sides of the same coin that together perform policy orchestration across incompatible cloud platforms.
IDQL is the universal declarative policy language that can be translated into a target system's proprietary or bespoke access policy format. Hexa is the open-source reference software that brings IDQL to life and makes it operational in the real world by connecting to target systems and performing the three main functions of discovery, translation, and orchestration.
Hexa Policy Orchestration was recently accepted as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project. The session will include a technical review of Hexa plus a demonstration of current capabilities.
Identity and access have always been joined at the hip. In the age of LDAP, authenticated users were granted permissions based on group membership. But this mechanism hasn’t transferred into the federated identity landscape.
Instead, modern identity systems try to generalize permissions into scopes that are embedded into access tokens. But this doesn’t facilitate fine-grained authorization - a “read:document” scope doesn’t typically mean the user can access every document!
While identity has moved to the cloud, we still don’t have fine-grained, scalable mechanisms for generalizing authorization. So every application builds its own, and IT ends up administering every application differently.
Fixing this is arguably the most pressing challenge for the IAM industry. In this talk, we propose a set of principles, inspired by zero-trust and the latest work in cloud-native authorization, that should underlie the solutions we build:
