Styra Named Outstanding in Micro-Services Capabilities in KuppingerCole Analysts’ 2022 Policy Based Access Management Market Compass

Styra, Inc., the creators and maintainers of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and leader of cloud-native authorization, was named outstanding in microservices capabilities, awarded the highest possible ranking in Security and Usability and recognized for its strong support for DevOps teams in the KuppingerCole Analysts AG’s 2022 Policy-based Access Management (PBAM) Market Compass Report. PBAM, a segment of the access control market, employs real-time evaluation of policies, while providing decisions to user requests for protected resources such as confidential documentation or sensitive databases. 

As companies build and adopt cloud-based applications, new intricacies create security challenges. Modern cloud-native applications can be composed of dozens of microservices, housed in containers and hosted on immutable, dynamically scaling platforms like Kubernetes — all of which are controlled via an exponentially growing number of APIs. All of these connections make solving for authorization and access more complex to manage, resulting in increased business risk and the need for a policy-based approach to security. 

To address this challenge, Styra created Open Policy Agent (OPA), an open-source project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS), an OPA control plane. OPA and Styra DAS provide unified authorization for applications and the infrastructure they run on, including automated guardrails for Kubernetes and across public cloud configuration, microservice authorization policies for service meshes and application authorization policies to help enterprises migrate to modern policy-as-code based entitlements in the cloud. Together, they ensure that authorization in complex environments can be controlled and audited across teams, clusters and clouds. 

As noted in the Market Compass Report, Styra DAS “provides an easy-to-use UI for the creation and management of policies,” allows for quick and easy testing to gauge rule changes’ effects, and “provides strong support for DevOps personnel in the protection of resources in a micro-services environment.” Also highlighted in the report were the company’s key strengths, including ​​strong cloud-native support, developer support tools, an intuitive user interface for policy management, and configuration-based licensing.

“The KuppingerCole Analysts’ PBAM Market Compass is another sign that the industry needs a solution for fine-grained cloud-native authorization,” said Bill Mann, CEO of Styra. “We recognized the need for this early on and created OPA as the de facto approach to authZ, and ever since have worked closely with our customers and the open source community to help them accelerate time to market with strong compliance and security guardrails in place. We’re proud to be recognized for our outstanding product capabilities.” 

“As reflected in the Market Compass Report, Styra is a growing organization that has a strong market standing when it comes to Policy Based Access Management,” said Graham Williamson, Senior Analyst at KuppingerCole Analysts. “Styra continuously matches the rapid pace of digital transformation — consistently reevaluating, updating and adding offerings to best support the industry needs to ensure they are on the cutting edge of innovation.”

To determine the results, KuppingerCole Analysts reviewed and scored the top access management solution providers using the KuppingerCole Market Compass. This analysis provides an overview of a particular IT market segment and identifies the strengths of products within that market segment. Styra was among 11 solutions companies evaluated.

Read the KuppingerCole 2022 Policy Based Access Management Market Compass Report here, and learn more about securing your cloud-native solutions with Styra here.

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 https://styra.com/.

KuppingerCole Analysts, founded in 2004, is an international and independent analyst organization headquartered in Europe. The company specializes in offering neutral advice, expertise, thought leadership and practical relevance in Information Security, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Governance (IAG), Risk Management & Compliance (GRC) as well as all areas concerning the Digital Transformation. KuppingerCole supports companies, corporate users, integrators and software manufacturers in meeting both tactical and strategic challenges. Maintaining a balance between immediate implementation and long-term viability is at the heart of KuppingerCole’s philosophy.

Victoria Johnson

Walker Sands for Styra

victoria.johnson@walkersands.com