Access control is vital in any modern business, especially in the cloud era, where high-profile data and computer system breaches are prevalent. As a security solution, an access control system minimizes these hazards by ensuring people have the appropriate levels of access based on their role or other criteria.

This limits connections to data, system files, and computer networks while simultaneously empowering people across the organization to do their jobs without having to rewrite security policies again and again. In this article, readers will discover more about cloud access control and learn about the five top-rated solutions.

What Is Access Control and What Makes It Essential for Businesses?

Access controls or authorization (AuthZ) is a fundamental security concept and technique businesses use to secure a computing environment.

Cloud access control involves using software to regulate who can use or view a company's online resources. Its goal is to minimize the security risk caused by unauthorized access to computers, applications, and online systems.

After a specific individual or entity is authenticated and their identity is confirmed, the next problem to solve is what they are allowed to do. If you think of a club, the first checkpoint is the bouncer who verifies ID, but after that there are still roles and restrictions.

Some people are allowed behind the bar, others in the kitchen, others backstage, and most are simply permitted in the general admission area. Managing "who can do what" is precisely what cloud permissions are all about, and it's quite a complex problem to solve.

If you are operating your business in the cloud, you've likely built some sort of permissions system many times over. And as users, we've experienced these systems ourselves, like when we are granted permission to view or edit a document.

Every application has some sort of access control in place, and each time, it needs to be built by a developer from scratch. But that has become an unnecessary waste of time, given the emergence of both open source and full SaaS solutions.

Best Solutions for Cloud Access Control Management

1. Permit.io

Permit.io is a software organization based in Tel Aviv, Israel. It opened for business in 2020.

Permit.io's pioneers founded the company after finding themselves building Identity Access Management or IAM mechanisms repeatedly at the firms they worked at, including Microsoft and Rookout. They believed this was a waste of time and that there had to be a better way.

Permit.io was their answer to this problem, solving a fundamental pain that every developer experiences. This solution makes it intuitive and fast for software developers to include permission control in their offerings. It also empowers the rest of the company with low code.

Permit.io's professional team is passionate about value-for-money developer tools, software, open-source, and positive client experiences and is also an avid supporter of product-led growth (PLG).

The company has demonstrated its commitment to providing end-to-end solutions that are community-based, open-source, and that have an intuitive user interface. The company recently launched FoAz (frontend-only authorization), which includes:

Secure API use

The FoAz proxy allows companies to securely use application programming interfaces or APIs from the front end with granular permissions directly from that point. This solution enables accepting API calls, adding secrets, permissions checking, and identity verification.

Zero glue-code third-party APIs use

FoAz allows companies to call any external service. These users can do this action directly from the front end without writing any backend logic. Plus, Permit.io's authorization control solution facilitates the addition of new capabilities to users' applications seamlessly and securely. This feature is possible through the integration of any third-party APIs.

Granular permissions for API protection

Using FoAz eliminates the need to rewrite users' APIs which lack the policy their application needs. Businesses can wrap and safeguard any API call by clicking or ticking a few boxes.

Permit.io's policy editor user interface makes generating policy as a code easy. This feature comes with strong authorization policies. They include relationship-based access control or ReBAC, role-based access control or RBAC, and attribute-based access control or ABAC.

Terminates backend dependencies

Businesses that choose FoAz can avoid making, managing, or spending on backend server hosting and instead concentrate on their products while enhancing security.

Low or no-code policy user interfaces

The FoAz proxy is the fastest and most efficient method of integrating permissions into a company's front-end application. It can save significant time and dramatically boost its development velocity, thanks to Permit.io's easy-to-use and no-code user interfaces.

Permit.io's FoAz functions as a business's backend proxy. It injects API tokens safely and enforces permissions for the user. This solution offers all that a business needs to move safely and fast. It is built on open source or OPA+OPAL as a service. Hence, users will benefit from UI and API control interfaces that make it easy to improve security.

2. OPA

OPA, or Open Policy Agent, is a general-purpose and open-source policy engine. This cloud access control provider unites policy implementation across the stack. It offers businesses high-level declarative language. This feature allows users to specify simple APIs and policies as code to offload policy decision-making from the users' application or software.

OPA is ideal for enforcing policies in API gateways, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, etc. Startup Styra created OPA, a graduate project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Its policy-based control is intended for cloud-native environments. This fine-grained control for administrators across the stack offers the following benefits:

Useful policy authoring tools

OPA's access control system adopts policy-as-code. It features tools that assist users in understanding and using policies they put in place. Additionally, OPA delivers the essential elements for policy and programming. They include coverage, integrated development environments, and testing. Also included are hot reloading, profiling, and automated performance tuning.

Flexible architecture

OPA's authorization control is deployable as a separate process on a similar host as the business or user's service. Companies can integrate the solution in three ways: Using a network proxy integrated with OPA, altering a company's service code, or importing an OPA-enabled library.

Users can embed OPA's policies into their service. They can also include them as a Go library evaluating policy or incorporate a WebAssembly runtime. Businesses can use OPA in compiling policy to WebAssembly directions.

3. Styra

Styra is a company based in Redwood City, California. It opened for business in 2016. It offers a platform that lets companies monitor and enforce authorization policies across cloud-native software applications. Moreover, this control system works with cloud-native APIs before runtime to define, keep tabs on, and implement policies.

The Styra platform takes in an enterprise context. It yields security decisions across clusters and namespaces. Clients can then write a policy once and enforce it where needed. Styra Declarative Authorization Service, or DAS, is the world's sole business-grade authorization platform. The company designed it specifically for OPA. This system's benefits include:

Fine-grained permission control

Styra features context-rich authorization made possible via policy, which is necessary for modern security strategies. The developer knows that ABAC, RBAC, or other detailed home-grown entitlements cannot achieve the required profound authorization.

Simplified collaboration and authoring

Styra DAS users can maintain policy consistency and integrity across the cloud, clusters, and teams in a control panel. It lets various groups engage in a graphical user interface that fits them.

One-language policy expression

Styra allows businesses using its DAS solution to use one language for declaring policy. This feature manages policy across a broad spectrum of computer software systems, including Linux, microservices, and gateway. Custom applications and databases, the public cloud, and Kubernetes are included. Styra DAS also includes decision logging, authoring, and policy monitoring. Companies can use the tool for distribution, impact analysis, and testing.

4. Cedar

Cedar is an evaluation engine and open-source policy language created by AWS (Amazon Web Services). This control solution defines access permissions utilizing a policy and is the same as how IAM policies function today.

Companies can use Cedar policies to control what resources the application users may access and what they are allowed to do. Cedar is the first-ever policy language built from the ground up. It is for formal verification by utilizing automated reasoning. Developers also used differential random testing to assess the solution rigorously.

Using Cedar access control system offers companies the following advantages:

Scalable and fast control

Cedar is a performant solution. Its developers designed the policy structure to be indexed for fast retrieval. Cedar is also for supporting scalable and quick real-time assessment. It has bounded latency.

Straightforward and expressive language

Cedar is an expressive yet simple policy language. Its developers purpose-built it to back authorization use cases for ABAC, RBAC, and other typical authorization models.

Analyzable solution

Cedar's developers created this control system for analysis using Automated Reasoning. This feature facilitates analyzer tools capable of optimizing company policies. The tools also prove that a user's security model is what they believe it is.

The Cedar control solution enables software developers to express fine-grained authorizations as policies that are easy to comprehend and enforce in their applications.

5. Oso

Oso, or Oso Cloud, is a framework for building permission or authorization in a company's application. This authorization-as-a-service solution is considered the most mature access control system of thousands of organizations. Oso has libraries for Java, Node.js, and Ruby. Plus, Rust, Go, and Python. Oso serves as a building block for ReBAC, RBAC, and ABAC. This opinionated data model has other benefits, including:

A single place for a company's authorization decisions

Businesses will find Oso useful because they can set up or model typical permission patterns with this solution's built-in primitives. Patterns can be relationships or RBAC. Users can extend the authorization patterns however they need using Polar, which is Oso's declarative policy language.

Furthermore, companies can go beyond the yes-or-no queries with Oso's filter feature. They can enforce permission over collections like "Show me just the records that [username] can view." Finally, Oso allows users to write unit tests over their authorization logic with the solution's single interface. Unexpected behavior can also be tracked using Oso's REPL or debugger.

Dependable and high-performance solution

The Oso access control system can deploy nodes in users' regions for less than 10 milliseconds of response time. It is also reliable and resilient, with many replicas globally for business-grade uptime.

Permit.io, OPA, Styra, Cedar, and Oso are today's best access control solutions. We recommend them for their ease of use and efficiency in securing businesses operating in the cloud.