Styra Introduces First Solution to Implement Open Policy Agent across Entire Cloud Infrastructure

 Styra, Inc., the founders of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and leader in cloud-native authorization, today announced new cloud infrastructure support via Terraform, extending Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS) guardrails to storage, network and compute resource configuration in public clouds including AWS, GCP and Azure. With this addition, Styra DAS now provides a unified policy-as-code solution, built on OPA, to ensure cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes and service mesh deployments are secure and compliant. With Styra DAS and OPA, cloud and DevOps teams have a unified platform for authorization to mitigate risk, reduce human error and accelerate platform development. 

“Until now, DevOps and cloud platform teams had to manage authorization, policy and configuration with disparate tools in each of their clouds, in each of their orchestration clusters, and between the microservices that comprise modern apps, ” said Tim Hinrichs, co-founder and chief technology officer of Styra. “OPA has become the standard way to validate configuration and enforce guardrails across disparate systems, but teams need a unified solution to deploy, monitor and manage OPA at scale across cloud, K8s and microservices. That’s where Styra DAS comes in.” 

With IT teams already spread thin, these individuals cannot continue to innovate and still provide the protection that their clouds, platforms and apps need as entry points expand. This is because in the modern era of cloud applications, the architects and engineers that create and manage those apps have an exponentially higher amount of discrete components to build, manage and secure. While the decomposition of apps into small, scalable services is the core of cloud digital transformation — as well as the key to fast updates, high uptime and global availability — it introduces incredible complexity when it comes to controlling access to each component, and protecting data privacy. 

These growing complexities make authorization —or controlling access— more critical than ever. Human engineers and security teams who in the past had to manage and secure three or four systems, cannot be expected to scale their effort across the hundreds or thousands of disparate components in a modern cloud application. To address the scale challenge of the cloud, teams must adopt automated security guardrails for access. These guardrails are a mission critical part of any cloud app deployment, because they allow enterprises to protect end-user data against attacks, ensure that all application components work together as intended, and prove compliance with today’s increasing security and privacy regulations.

By extending Styra DAS to Terraform cloud infrastructure policy, cloud and DevOps teams no longer have to manage multiple security tools, or rely on best-effort manual processes, thanks to a unified platform for authorization that’s mapped to common security standards and industry best practices. With this control plane, teams can:

With over 85 million OPA downloads deployed across hundreds of organizations, OPA has become the de facto standard for platform authorization. Now, with Styra DAS extended across the cloud platform, teams have a single solution to deploy, manage and monitor OPA at scale. Together, OPA and Styra DAS provide security, operations and compliance guardrails to protect modern app platforms across cloud, Kubernetes and microservices.

Styra DAS cloud infrastructure support via Terraform is available now to all Styra customers.

Styra, the founders of Open Policy Agent (OPA), provides open source and commercial solutions that enable enterprises to define, enforce and monitor authorization policy across their cloud-native applications, as well as the infrastructure they run on. Styra policy-as-code solutions let developers, DevOps and security teams mitigate risks, reduce human error and accelerate application development. Learn more at styra.com.