Cloud-native and open-source technologies are booming. But for a successful cloud expansion, IT decision-makers and developers need to be in agreement despite their unique roles in the process. As more enterprises transition to cloud-native environments, the big question is how aligned are IT decision-makers and developers?

By 2023, over 500 million digital apps and services will be developed and deployed using cloud native approaches. To put that in perspective, more applications will be developed on the cloud in a four-year period (2019-2023) than the total number of apps produced in the past 40 years. Clearly, organizations are buying into the cloud. But the question is: Do they fully understand it? And do they know how to secure the applications they built within it?

IT leaders have historically managed all infrastructure decisions across storage, network, compute and other aspects of the cloud. But this isn’t necessarily the case today. As organizations move away from on-premise cloud infrastructure and adopt cloud-native technologies, modern developers are playing a larger role in decision-making — especially when it comes to policy decisions like the control of cloud-based tools and the code that runs on them.

While the last two years accelerated digital transformation across a wide range of industries, this has been a long time coming for healthcare. Healthcare has been undergoing a massive shift to improve security, streamline operations, and enhance the patient experience—and much of that shift centers around the movement to the cloud. Cloud-native ostensibly offers a better, more accessible user experience marked by enhanced uptime, reliability, and efficiency.

By its general purpose nature, Open Policy Agent (OPA) allows for a unified way of dealing with policy across a wide range of use cases. One particularly interesting use case for OPA, and one which will be the focus of this series of blogs, is that of application authorization (or entitlements, or simply, authorization).