Gal Helemski

September 10, 2024

Many enterprises have complex environments where they juggle legacy systems, clouds, and third-party integrations – managing authorization is no small task. This complexity often leads to disparate access control mechanisms, increasing security risks, operational inefficiencies, and potential compliance failures. To mitigate these challenges, enterprise and security architects must prioritize standardization as a cornerstone of their security strategy. Why? Standardizing access control policies improves security and enables scalability, collaboration, and efficiency across the organization.

Policy-based access control (PBAC), a modern approach towards authorization, provides a unified framework for centralizing and managing access control policies across diverse technological environments. This blog covers why enterprise architects and security professionals should care about standardization in authorization.

1. Bridging the Gap Between Business and Cybersecurity

One of the biggest challenges enterprises face is ensuring that business requirements translate seamlessly into access control policies. With different stakeholders, from security to business owners, there’s often a disconnect between business goals and access policy implementations. Standardization of authorization solves this problem by offering a common framework for managing access policies across the enterprise.

Using a standardized framework such as PBAC, stakeholders can build policies in plain language and rely on a graphical UI. Whether you’re managing access for custom applications, API gateways, microservices, or data access, the standardized approach ensures that policies are enforced consistently across all environments. This reduces the overhead and human error, ensuring smoother collaboration and more effective policy enforcement across the tech stack.

2. Consistency in Enforcement Across Systems

In complex enterprises, the lack of a standardized authorization framework often leads to policy discrepancies and conflicting rules across different systems. These inconsistencies introduce vulnerabilities and operational inefficiencies, as each environment may implement access controls differently, resulting in potential loopholes for malicious actors.

By standardizing on PBAC, security and architect teams ensure access policies are enforced uniformly across the entire tech stack. Whether a user is accessing customer data in a CRM system or sensitive financial records in a database, the same set of authorization rules apply. This level of consistency is critical in achieving a Zero Trust architecture, where no user is implicitly trusted, and access is continuously verified based on consistent, well-defined policies.

3. Reducing Operational Complexity

Fragmented access control systems not only increase the risk of security breaches but also complicate day-to-day operations. With different teams using various tools to manage access, there’s often confusion, duplicated effort, and a greater chance of errors. Architects and security professionals must simplify these workflows to improve operational efficiency.

Standardization reduces this complexity by centralizing policy management. Instead of managing separate tools and systems across various teams, organizations can streamline their operations for faster, more efficient policy enforcement. This centralized approach also benefits developers, who often face the burden of building access control policies for individual applications. A PBAC framework, with tools like policy-as-code, relieves them of this responsibility, allowing them to focus on core functionality while ensuring security is managed effectively across the enterprise.

By centralizing control, policies can be managed from a single interface, ensuring changes are propagated seamlessly throughout the organization. This approach significantly reduces the time and effort required for policy management and audits.

4. Simplifying Compliance and Auditing

For enterprises, ensuring compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, or SOX is critical, but complex environments make audits a logistical nightmare. Each system may store its own access logs and maintain unique reporting formats, making it difficult for compliance teams to gather the necessary data quickly and comprehensively.

A standardized authorization platform like PlainID offers enhanced visibility and auditability, simplifying compliance efforts. With all access policies managed and enforced from one platform, compliance teams can easily generate consistent, transparent reports across the entire organization. This reduces the time spent on audits, lowers the risk of non-compliance, and ensures that access control policies are always aligned with the latest regulatory requirements.

5. Future-Proofing Security Strategies

As enterprises grow, so do their technology stacks. Security and enterprise architects need solutions that scale alongside the business without introducing new risks or complexities. Standardizing authorization across all systems future-proofs your security strategy by providing a scalable, flexible framework that can evolve as your organization adopts new technologies.

Standardization ensures that as new platforms, applications, or services are integrated into the enterprise environment, they can be easily brought under the same security protocols – the same access control policies. This agility is critical for enterprises undergoing digital transformation or mergers and acquisitions, where new systems must be integrated seamlessly and securely.

Key Takeaway: A Business Strategy for Enterprise Security

Standardization is no longer a luxury in enterprise security – it’s a necessity. As architects and security professionals, embracing a unified authorization framework enhances security and compliance, simplifies operations, and supports the organization’s long-term growth. PlainID’s platform offers the tools needed to achieve this, providing a common language and structure for managing access control across technologies.

Standardizing on the PlainID Platform offers a powerful security solution for organizations looking to reduce complexity, improve collaboration between security and business, and ensure consistent policy enforcement across all systems. By adopting a standardized approach, enterprise architects can build a more secure, scalable, and efficient security ecosystem—one that is well-equipped to meet the challenges of today’s digital landscape.

Contact our team to learn more about how PlainID can help your organization centralize policy management.