Styra Pioneers Context-Rich Entitlements for Modern Application Authorization

Creators and maintainers of Open Policy Agent solve the authorization gap between IAM and application teams with policy-as-code

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Feb. 22, 2022

Styra, Inc., the founders and maintainers of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and leader of cloud-native authorization, today announced Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS) for Cloud-Native Entitlements. Solving the gap between legacy and modern application authorization, this new capability enables Identity-and-Access Management (IAM) teams to take full advantage of existing systems-of-record while providing developer teams what they need—cloud-native, context-rich authorization, replicated across clouds, regions, availability zones and clusters. With Styra DAS, organizations can use their existing centralized IAM systems to seamlessly move applications to the cloud and accelerate their cloud migration with unified authorization.

As organizations continue their digital transformation, they discover their homegrown entitlement solutions impede progress because their functionality also must be migrated to the cloud. These services are built on top of LDAP, AD, SCIM, etc., and if left on-premises would create a high-latency, single-point-of-failure for a modern application—a clear anti-pattern for cloud applications. 

“For IAM teams that previously had to pull together their own homegrown entitlements band aid, our technology is a game changer,” said Tim Hinrichs, co-founder and chief technology officer of Styra. “Now, with Styra DAS for Cloud-Native Entitlements, IAM teams can finally move to cloud-native technologies and scale to the level their organizations require. We’re the first and only organization to support this for enterprise environments.”

Styra DAS for Cloud-Native Entitlements

Styra DAS for Cloud-Native Entitlements allows organizations to decouple rules, regulations and policies from an application and use existing data sources, which:

  • Improves Time-to-Market: seamlessly provide application teams a stateless, easy-to-run cloud-native entitlements service that can be bundled with their app.  
  • Avoids Costs: use existing centralized IAM systems, avoid costly overhauls and understand the impact a policy will have on the application.
  • Provides Audit-Ready Authorization: access to pre-built policy packs that align to decision logs—the proof of authorization implementation is clear and exportable.

“Styra DAS for Cloud-Native Entitlements is addressing a difficult problem that many enterprise IAM teams are facing as they move to cloud-native environments,” said Martin Kuppinger, Founder and Principal Analyst at KuppingerCole. “There is a strong need for policy-based management of these entitlements. Styra is launching an innovative solution to address these challenges.”

Styra has experienced substantial growth and recently secured $40 million in a Series B funding round in May 2021. In 2022, Styra will add to its turnkey control plane for OPA to provide unified authorization across the cloud-native stack. With the open source project growing 300% YoY to hit over 125M downloads to date, OPA has become the de facto standard for authorization in the cloud-native environment. Styra DAS provides a unified policy-as-code platform, built on OPA, to ensure that cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, application, and service mesh deployments are secure and compliant. Together, OPA and Styra DAS provide security, operations and compliance guardrails across the entire cloud-native stack.

To learn more about Styra DAS for Cloud-Native Entitlements, download our whitepaper or visit our website.

About Styra

Styra enables enterprises to define, enforce and monitor policy across their cloud-native environments. With a combination of open source (Open Policy Agent) and commercial products (Declarative Authorization Service), Styra provides security, operations and compliance guardrails to protect applications, as well as the infrastructure they run on. Styra policy-as-code approach lets developers, DevOps, and security teams mitigate risks, reduce human error and accelerate application development. Learn more at Styra.