Styra now enables highly regulated industries to take advantage of cloud-native authorization policy

Styra announced that Styra Essentials now includes Long Term Support for Open Policy Agent, enabling companies in highly regulated industries to take advantage of cloud-native authorization policy.

Highly regulated industries typically limit how often companies can update their software in order to reduce new risks. Styra Essentials solves this problem with a vetted, semi-annual version of OPA that includes critical fixes and security patches, as well as Styra Essentials 24×7 Support.

“At Styra, we’re focused on delivering the best solutions we can to the OPA Community and our customers of all sizes and across all verticals,” said Tim Hinrichs, co-creator of OPA and co-founder and chief technology officer of Styra.

“This release is a result of requests from our most highly regulated users in the healthcare and financial industries to provide a version of OPA that works with their upgrade regulations and includes 24×7 support from us. ”

Managed updates

As companies move from experimentation towards production, reducing risk becomes more critical. One way some teams mitigate risk is by limiting when new features and functionality can be deployed.

Styra Essentials limits the risk often associated with new features, while still providing security-related updates on a schedule that can be managed by companies for which outage windows, patches and updates are closely managed.

Enhanced enterprise support

Many highly regulated companies cannot move forward with software that does not have 24×7 support staff. Styra, as the founders and maintainers of OPA, has a team of OPA and Rego experts on call to support a growing set of commercial customers, as well as open source users. Styra Essentials includes this best-in-class support, including:

• SLA-based incident support: 24×7 technical support for business-critical infrastructure and time-sensitive projects.
• Training on best practices and policy development: Hands-on training for cloud, platform and DevOps teams, including OPA best practices and policy development in Rego.
• Regular business and policy reviews: Quarterly business reviews to ensure deployments are on schedule and working as expected, as well as build a plan for security updates and patches.