Stop Rebuilding Permissions in Application Code

As SaaS products grow beyond simple administrator, member, and viewer roles, authorization requirements often become contextual, tenant-specific, customer-configurable, and subject to auditing, making scattered application-code checks difficult to maintain and explain. The article distinguishes authentication, which establishes identity, from authorization, which determines whether a principal may perform an action on a resource under particular conditions, and argues that identity providers and JWT claims should not serve as complete permission systems. It recommends separating centrally managed policies from locally enforced decisions through a control plane and local Policy Decision Points, avoiding remote authorization calls on critical request paths while allowing policies and data to be updated in real time. Permit.io presents its platform as an example of this architecture, supporting policy engines such as OPA/Rego and Cedar, evolving authorization models from RBAC to attribute- and relationship-based controls, and operational features including administration, GitOps, synchronization, and decision logs. The proposed migration approach is incremental: define permissions in product terms, move high-friction domains first, enforce checks in the backend, align frontend behavior afterward, and use decision logs to validate outcomes and support compliance evidence.

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