San Mateo, Calif. – May 24, 2022 – NextLabs today announced the latest version of Control Center and CloudAz 2022.05. Control Center is the central component of the NextLabs’ Data Centric Security product suite, powered by patented dynamic authorization technology and industry leading attribute-based policy engine to help enterprises solve the most complex access and data protection challenges.

This release includes enhanced cloud-native support for hybrid and multi-cloud deployment, allowing organizations to extend zero trust, dynamic access control to applications and data in the cloud. New enhancements and capabilities control authorization in a microservice architecture using centrally managed policy and help enterprises embrace cloud-native technologies at hyperscale, along with the benefits of containerization and virtualization. NextLabs also introduces key innovations including enhanced support for DataSecOps and cybersecurity mesh to enable organizations to bring cloud services into their zero-trust architecture and employ policy-based access control with more granular and dynamic authorization decisions to protect data and prevent data breaches.

Control Center provides a simplified way to manage fine-grained authorizations, integrating data classification, access control, digital rights management, and audit capabilities into a single platform. Policy enforcement can enforce access points across a distributed computing environment, including authorization for cloud services, enterprise applications, databases, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) for unstructured data. Customers can also secure their big data and SaaS applications, microservices, API gateways, and any other type of application—regardless of whether it is deployed on-premises, in private, public, or hybrid clouds.

This release has added several advanced policy administration, lifecycle, and audit features to support the increasing importance of policy governance. Policy administration improvement includes user centric UI and REST APIs for delegated administration and segregation of duties facility. A full policy lifecycle management approach with approval workflows is supported, as well as version control and policy rollback. NextLabs also provides several policy analysis and audit tools with full audit trail capability. Moreover, there is a policy validation application where policies can be previewed to validate correct decisions, allowing administrators to test out policies before they are published.

Key additions and enhancements to Control Center and CloudAz 2022.05 include:

• Cloud-native support to hybrid and multi-cloud deployment based on Docker and Kubernetes. Using cloud-native Control Center applications, organizations can take full advantage of cloud infrastructure, orchestration, data services, and application run time.
• Container deployment model to include both Kubernetes templates and Helm charts, offering a wide variety of support for diverse deployment models including AKS, EKS, GKE, OpenShift, Terraform, and OVA; enabling simple and automated VM and container deployment and upgrade.
• Microservices support for containerized architecture to enable service-based deployment, Control Center microservices are built in such a way that each microservice can be deployed, upgraded, and scaled independently.
• PDP sidecar for microservices access enforcement to control authorization in a microservice architecture using centrally managed policy.
• Zero trust micro segmentation and software defined perimeter capability.
• Delegated administration and full policy lifecycle management with approval workflows.
• Test plans creation in Control Center Web Console to automate policy testing and validation.
• Attribute provider framework to allow easy integration of dynamic attribute retrieval from any source, including built in support of SCIM protocols for Policy Information Points (PIP).
• SDK allowing companies to centrally manage and orchestrate authorization policies.
• Control Center user authentication through AD, Azure AD, LDAP, Okta, and any SAML and OIDC-based external identity provider.
• Extending Control Center logging to the Apache Log4j 2 logging framework and integration with the leading SIEM solutions.

NextLabs’ Control Center and CloudAz have been designed to solve the most complex challenges associated with access management and data protection; they have been architected to run on cloud-native infrastructure and scale rapidly to meet the demands of the largest federal agencies and global companies. NextLabs helps businesses modernize IT, automate security and compliance procedures, and strengthen cyber defense by safeguarding data and application access, protect data, and enable teams to collaborate securely based on centrally managed policy without requiring code changes or application downtime. The software also provides insight into user behavior through dashboards, reports, and automated monitoring facilities, alerting on identified anomalies and risky behavior.

Benefits of Control Center and CloudAz include:

• Prevent data breaches, fraud, and regulatory violations.
• Centralize management of authorizations across applications in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment for consistent enforcement.
• Streamline access management, reducing administrative burden.
• Enable zero trust and global data access transparently to empower workforce with safe and fast access to internal resources and in the cloud.
• React and scale rapidly to keep up with ever-evolving data security requirements; while reducing risks that can threaten productivity, IP, and company reputation.
• Make policy changes in real time, without requiring code changes or application downtime.

“As authorization continues to be a central part of broader access strategies such as Zero Trust and cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA), our mission for Control Center and CloudAz is to be the most scalable and easiest to deploy runtime authorization and policy enforcement product in the market— we are one step closer with this release,” said Keng Lim, CEO and Founder of NextLabs. “This latest release of Control Center and CloudAz allows our customers to easily apply and maintain consistent authorization policies to safeguard data across the hybrid and multi-cloud environment within days.”