From A (ACLs) to Z (Zanzibar): Managing Access Policies with IDQL/Hexa

We're quite excited to have Gerry Gebel join us for one exclusive evening! Gerry will be visiting Vancouver, and he's kind enough to tell us about his work on IDQL and authorization. Gerry is the Head of Standards at Strata Identity, and was one of the moving forces behind Axiomatics before that. He's an Identity and authorization veteran, this will be a session not to be missed !

Talk details
Multi-cloud adoption is accelerating across all industries, resulting in new challenges for organizations who must manage platform-specific access policies in the bespoke policy syntax of each cloud. This introduces potential security and risk gaps between cloud identity systems due to increased policy fragmentation and technical complexity that can obscure visibility making it difficult to determine “who has access to what”.

The session will introduce an open source solution to multi-cloud access policy fragmentation: Identity Query Language (IDQL) and Hexa Orchestration. IDQL is the universal declarative policy language that can be translated into a target system's proprietary or bespoke access policy format. Hexa is the open source reference software that brings IDQL to life and makes it operational in the real world by connecting to target systems and translating policies into the target system’s format.

The following topics and demos will be covered in the talk:

• A brief overview of the complexities with managing access policy in multi-cloud and hybrid scenarios
• Review of the IDQL format and associated GitHub repository
• Technical architecture of Hexa Orchestration open source
• Tour of Hexa GitHub repo and the main components
• Demonstrations will include use cases involving Google, Open Policy Agent and Amazon Verified Permissions
• Want to become involved and join the Hexa open-source working group? Go to hexaorchestration.org to learn more!