Styra DAS extends OPA policy-as-code guardrails to public, private and hybrid cloud configurations

Styra 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.”

Scalable security

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:

• Eliminate ongoing management of custom tooling and speed deployment with a single policy framework for cloud infrastructure authorization
• Manage the entire lifecycle of the cloud platform from design to deployment
• Eliminate policy silos with a single platform for cross-team collaboration
• Automate configuration validation, deploy platform security based on proven standards, and prove compliance
• Get started quickly with the only library of security policies built by the founders of OPA

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.