Why use UserClouds AuthZ?

UserClouds AuthZ improves upon home-grown, role-based and attribute-based systems in three major ways.

1. Granularity

Reflect reality: Unlike role-based systems, UserClouds allows you to reflect the real-world relationships that guide your authorization model - relationships like files & folders, indirect reports and B2B customer organizations.

Incorporate hierarchy: Rather than static roles, the AuthZ model can traverse across relationships to support complex logic like “Users in Company A can view all files inside projects that are owned by their company.”

Get fine-grained: This allows you to build exceptionally granular authorization scenarios. It makes it possible to manage access at any level - all the way from simple roles down to the individual resource-level.

2. Simplicity

No more role explosion: By modeling authorization as a graph, UserClouds can support even the most complex scenarios with just a handful of object types and relationship types.

Developer-friendly APIs: Everything is managed through an API. To update your graph, call our CreateObject and CreateEdge APIs. To run an authorization check, call the CheckAttribute API and ask “does user X have permission Y on resource Z?”.

Central, single source of truth: With UserClouds, your authorization model is unified in a single, callable service. This makes your authorization system simple to reason about and easy to maintain.

3. Scalability

Iterate as you grow: As your business grows, product iteration and growing customer expectations will require your authorization model to evolve. With graph-based access control, evolution is straightforward: simply update existing types, or add a new type of object or relationship to your graph. This lets your model grow with your organization.

Grow to a billion users: UserClouds uses the same authorization model as Google - from YouTube to Calendar to Drive to Photos. Google have scaled this approach to a billion users and more resources.

Speed at scale: When it comes to your end users, a seamless, fast experience is critical. Google has shown shown graph-based authorization can support millions of authorization requests per second with a P95 latency of under 10ms.