The Authorization Gap
You've invested in identity. SSO is in place. But who decides what users can actually do—and where does that logic live?
Most organizations have a gap between authentication and true access control. This is how to find it, understand it, and close it.
You're already doing authorization. Just not well.
Every application makes access decisions. Who can see this record? Who can approve this transaction? Who can access this customer's data?
The question isn't whether you have authorization. It's whether those decisions are consistent, explainable, and manageable—or scattered across codebases, config files, and tribal knowledge.
Sound familiar?
These are the symptoms of the authorization gap. You might recognize a few.
The audit scramble
"Show me everyone who can access customer PII and why." Three weeks, five teams, still not confident in the answer.
The customer request you can't meet
"We need row-level access based on region, role, and time of day." Six-month custom build. Maybe.
The developer tax
Every app team writing their own permission checks. Same logic, different implementations, endless maintenance.
The access review theater
Annual reviews that are really just managers clicking "approve" because nobody knows what half these entitlements mean.
The role explosion
Started with 10 roles. Now you have 200. And a spreadsheet to track what they all mean.
The decision layer is missing.
Identity systems answer "who is this person?"
Authorization answers "what can they do, to what, under what conditions, right now?"
Most organizations have invested heavily in the first question. The second is solved ad-hoc, app by app, team by team. That's the gap.
Authorization isn't binary. It's a spectrum.
Where does your organization sit today?
Centralized Identity
SSO is in place, but authorization is still fragmented.
You've unified authentication. Roles exist in your IdP. But fine-grained access decisions still happen app by app. The "who can do what" question is still hard to answer.
Most organizations are at Level 1, thinking they're at Level 3.
Every shortcut compounds.
Every hardcoded permission check. Every role that's really five roles duct-taped together. Every "just add them to admin for now."
That's authorization debt. And like all debt, it accrues interest—in audit findings, in slow delivery, in breaches you can't explain.
The longer you wait to address it, the more expensive it gets.
Imagine this instead.
This isn't fantasy. It's what externalized, policy-driven authorization looks like.
Answer audit questions in minutes, not weeks.
Deploy new access policies in days, not quarters.
Reduce developer time spent on permission logic by 70%.
Say yes to customer access requirements without a 6-month roadmap.
Give auditors a clear, explainable trail of every access decision.
You have options. Here's how to think about them.
Build it yourself
You can. Many teams start here. It works—until the second app, the acquisition, the audit. The question is how long you stay in this phase and what it costs over time.
The build vs. buy realityOpen source (OPA, etc.)
Powerful, flexible, developer-loved. But it's an engine, not a platform. You'll build the management layer, the integrations, the audit tooling yourself.
When OPA makes senseAn authorization platform
Purpose-built for the problem. Faster to value, but a vendor relationship. The right choice depends on your maturity, scale, and appetite.
What to look for in a platformWe believe authorization is fundamental, not an afterthought.
We believe policies should be readable by the people who understand the business and the people who write code.
We believe access decisions should be explainable, auditable, and fast.
We believe you shouldn't need a specialized language to answer "who can access this, and why?"
We built PlainID around these beliefs.
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