How do I avoid role explosion while still enforcing least privilege?

Use RBAC for coarse-grain access (job functions) and ABAC for resource scope (tenantId, environment, region). Keep a small, curated catalog of permission sets and enforce tag/attribute requirements in policy. This avoids creating bespoke roles per team/service.

We have legacy apps that can’t do SSO. Now what?

Minimize Privileged Access Management (PAM) to those systems only. Put them behind strong MFA, session recording, and JIT elevation. Work toward wrapping them with identity-aware proxies or migrating to protocols like SAML/OIDC. Don’t let legacy dictate your modern posture.

Is OPA/Rego or Cedar better for policy-as-code?

Use what fits your ecosystem. Rego has broader tooling and is great for infra checks and app auth. Cedar is tightly integrated with AWS Verified Permissions and shines for fine-grained auth in AWS-centric stacks. Both are composable and testable; the key is versioning and CI enforcement.

How do I make auditors comfortable with JIT access?

Tie approvals to sessions (approvalId in session tags), enforce MFA and time-bound roles, and ship daily evidence packs that show who requested what, who approved it, why, and what they did. Auditors love deterministic controls with logs—JIT is actually stronger than standing access.

Security-compliance · Oct 1, 2025 · 10 minute read

Guardrails, Not Gates: Designing IAM for Regulated, Fast-Moving Orgs

If your IAM strategy is a ticket queue, you’re paying a tax on every deploy. Here’s how to turn policy into code, speed up delivery, and still pass the audit.

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Guardrails, Not Gates: Designing IAM for Regulated, Fast-Moving Orgs

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist