Postponing success is costly

Software development, for obvious reasons, focuses on rich functions and usability. Security often appears to be a necessary evil, something that causes delays in projects and makes things more complicated. A recent report on secure software development practices concludes that "organizations typically choose to transfer risk from development to operations, where the remediation cost for vulnerabilities are the highest" (Forrester, "State of Application Security").

The benefits of doing it right from the beginning

By externalizing authorization from application code, software developers can gain a number of benefits:

• Time-to-market: with standardized reusable components application development is faster, while quality assurance is improved.
• Flexibility: access control based on externalized policies enables adaption to new requirements without the need to change existing code.
• Customer satisfaction: customers can alter authorization logic throughout the software development, deployment and production phases without impacting the implementation effort. This allows them to change their minds without blowing their budgets or your patience!
• Cost reductions: "Those employing a more coordinated, prescriptive approach to application security saw more positive ROI", according to the Forrester report quoted above, a finding well aligned with the experiences of Axiomatics customers.
• Competitive edge: Customers are increasingly adopting the Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) concept based on the XACML standard to control authorization from a central point. Software developers offering solutions that are "XACML ready" have a competitive advantage.

Building authorization logic by yourself makes as much sense as coding your own SQL engine for an application that requires a database. By using state of the art components from dedicated vendors and experts, you are much more likely to meet your project goals in time.

Partnering with Axiomatics

Axiomatics collaborates with a wide range of software developing companies across the globe. Whether you want to completely embed authorization components in our own software or just need to integrate partial capabilities within your solution, Axiomatics is happy to serve.