What is Authorization

Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions, such as Okta and Azure Active Directory, play a crucial role in managing identities and organizational relationships, providing authentication protocols like SAML and SSO, and maintaining role assignments distinct from application-specific roles. Authentication solutions, including Auth0 and AWS Cognito, verify user identities and issue JWTs containing user claims, which are used to make authorization decisions without re-authentication. Authorization, or AuthZ, determines access within applications through models like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), utilizing policy decision points and policy enforcement points to manage complex access patterns. As applications grow, particularly in distributed microservices architectures, authorization challenges increase, often requiring refactoring of solutions. To address these challenges, leveraging open-source tools such as OPA and ORY, and adhering to best practices, is recommended to avoid continually rebuilding authorization systems.