Digital transformation is driving the adoption of cloud technologies across different industries and enables them to collaborate better, unlock newer value streams and improve security. With the growing digital landscape over the past few years, it has also become imperative for IT teams to meet both inter and intra-enterprise security requirements of the organization.

Policy-based access control (PBAC) enables organizations to control their data flow and user access dynamically. It uses digital policies comprised of logical rules to maintain and evaluate user access. It is also capable of scaling and building the system on existing IAM, while providing an access-control solution according to context-based policies.

What is Policy-Based Access Control?

PBAC is a user access control framework that evaluates the user’s access based on the user and set policies by the organization. This helps organizations implement roles in a manageable way across different locations, teams and levels. PBAC follows a ‘zero-trust’ model which enforces strict access controls within the organization irrespective of roles or designations.

Key Features Of Policy-Based Access Control

Flexibility with technology

PBAC should be agonistic to the consuming application. The policies are set by the organization and the same should be carried across all the applications irrespective of their operations or technical implementations. The same policy will address XACML requests/responses, or similar responses to the backend app, and the OAuth token, enabling access to the executing function for the web front-end.

Flexible building blocks

The building blocks of PBAC are the pieces of information and data, etc. that it relies on to make the access decisions. The PBAC method offers a flexible solution to its policy building blocks, to enable the usage of any existing data as part of the decision making. PBAC supports predefined or configured data sources, and enables flexible mapping of identities and authorization data.

Support for scalability of the organization

PBAC needs to be reliantly scalable across the organization. It should follow the ‘Write once, use many times’ methodology. Once defined, these rules should be flexible and scalable to be implemented for bigger numbers. Let it be 1 or 1000, the policies should be compliant and aligned towards organizational rules.

Compliant with organizational standards

A good PBAC system will present the identities, actions and data that each policy statement applies to – thereby providing the full visibility compliance personnel requires. The PBAC system and setup should be compliant with organization rules and regulations providing easy transition and access to the stakeholders.

Better visibility & control

Companies today are dealing with collaboration and employees in remote locations where IT teams have less visibility and control over user activities and access controls. By centralizing these, PBAC should be able to provide a unified solution to control, consolidate and simplify access privileges independent of where the data is stored by the organization.

With PBAC, organizations unlock an advanced framework to centrally manage permissions and provide assurance for the enterprise in a scalable solution. It helps IT teams to think about security concerns in business terms, and PBAC combines semantic security risk management with a dynamic policy framework to mitigate security threats across modern service-oriented application architectures whether they are On-Premises or deployed in the Cloud.

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