Authorization and access control have long been complex challenges for businesses. Often fragmented and neglected, many organizations struggle to formulate a cohesive approach to managing access, dealing with lack of visibility and the technical debt of outdated solutions. The rapid growth of digital and physical assets, as well as mergers and acquisitions, B2B ecosystems, data marketplaces and partner networks, combined with huge volumes of data, have increased complexity to a point where traditional methods for controlling access just don’t work effectively anymore.

The Limitations of Authorization as Code

Authorization as code has been a popular approach advocated by software engineers and cybersecurity specialists. Unfortunately, it has also obscured visibility for and the process of engaging owners of applications, business owners and teams external to engineering, who often have responsibility for the associated revenue stream (and therefore the highest stake in ensuring the success of an application). In most enterprises, access policies aren’t invented by developers. Rather, developers are told what rules to implement by their business-side counterparts.

Empowering and Democratizing Access Management Through a Graph-Based Approach

With a graph approach, subject matter experts, data scientists, software engineers and product owners can view the relationships between people, processes, things and participate in designing intuitive access policies. This essentially turns the development process on its head, letting business users visualize and model their own access rules directly in a graph, and hand over their work to the developers. The intuitive and visual way policies are modeled makes them easy to prove, as opposed to a complex ruleset encoded into a programming language.

This democratization of access management can have major implications for the future of products and services, and the speed and simplicity of access controls into the future. By providing more transparency and engagement to business users, applications can better meet their design goals, access can be adjusted and tweaked as required, and developers are free to focus on core application requirements. This results in products coming to market faster, offering a better experience to users, consistency across the brand and functionality for innovative use cases (like delegated authorization or seamless experiences between partner applications).

Implementing scalable, dynamic access control is easier than you think. With IndyKite’s platform and capabilities, you can modernize your access management without disrupting your current stack.

To learn more download E-Guide: Externalize and democratize dynamic authorization across your organization.