San Mateo, Calif. – December 4, 2023- NextLabs today announced major enhancements to CloudAz, the control center of NextLabs’ comprehensive Zero Trust Data Security Software Suite. As a Zero Trust unified policy platform to provide central administration and orchestration of policy and real time policy decisioning engine, CloudAz is the foundational service providing dynamic authorization and attribute-based access control (ABAC) to secure access and protect applications and data anywhere on-premises, in public, private, or hybrid cloud, while collecting activity and policy logs from all policy enforcement points in a central database for audit and analytics.

The latest version of CloudAz delivers enriched policy orchestration and governance with an updated system administration UI providing clear insights into system health details across the policy system landscape. This release also contains improvement to the CI/CD support for automated deployment, and support for containerized code and microservices API. Additionally, CloudAz can now integrate seamlessly with any cloud application using OAuth2 and SAML access token via authorization claims.

The latest update also brings notable additions to the CloudAz Policy Studio, streamlining policy management and audit capabilities with a new dashboard for real-time policy analytics. CloudAz System Administrator has been bolstered with enhancements to the policy lifecycle functionality and access control model, ensuring more efficient management of permissions and improve governance. The release also includes enhancement to the CloudAz Policy Engine’s ability to consume user claims in OAuth, SAML, and JWT access token for policy decision. These updates align with NextLabs’ ongoing commitment to extend zero trust data security to applications and data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

This release also includes other features and improvements:

Policy and System Administration:

• Enhanced access control policies to allow persona-based access control, along with adding support for multi-value attributes
• Extended security key store management to support FPE (Format Preserving Encryption) and simplified secure socket layer (SSL) certificate configuration
• Added customer branding support

Policy Management:

• Improved UX/UI of CloudAz Policy Studio including new dashboard for identifying real time trends and policy enforcement patterns
• Added support for expiration of permission granted by policy
• Added support for association of component to policy query, visual indication of deactivated components, and framework for validating policy obligation
• Improved policy orchestration workflow to ensure integrity of policy throughout its lifecycle

Visibility and Analytics:

• Updated the policy management activity logging and audit framework
• Improved workflow for real time policy analysis and audit reporting

Policy Information Point (PIP):

• Enhanced support for SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) allowing automation of provisioning attributes from a wide range of data source
• Unified dynamic attribute provider framework under a single plugin

API and Integration:

• Extended APIs and integration with cloud management tools, security systems, and custom applications.
• Zero Code approach to integrate with any database-driven application

Cloud-native:

• Streamlined cloud-native deployment by making container images more secure and easier to configure coupled with fine-tuned Kubernetes configurations, simplifying container deployments and upgrades

With the rising popularity of the zero-trust paradigm, enterprises are searching for solutions that are proven, easy to manage, and scalable to address their rapidly evolving cybersecurity, compliance, and digital transformation challenges. CloudAz addresses these demands by providing a business friendly policy language, robust policy management and governance functionality, and enterprise-class system management facility with rapid deployment experience, enabling organizations to automate policy enforcement, secure access, and protect critical data at the source, at rest, in use, and on the move across the extended enterprise.

Benefits of CloudAz include:

• Control access and protect data anywhere whether it is on-premises or in the cloud to prevent breaches, fraud, and regulatory violations
• Ensure business continuity and strengthen risk management through automated controls and strong policy governance to prevent breach
• Compress time to value and avoid costly customization to react rapidly to changes in business and regulatory requirements
• Reduce the cost of compliance through efficient monitoring and audit of data security activity
• Cloud-native and containerized architecture offers freedom to choose the right cloud deployment strategy, whether it is hybrid or multi-cloud
• Zero trust architecture with data centric policy enforcement to accelerate cloud adoption without compromising security coverage and total cost of ownership

“Our mission is to maintain CloudAz as the best performance and most scalable zero trust policy engine on the market,” said Keng Lim, CEO and Founder of NextLabs. “This latest release takes it one step further to deliver the most advanced zero trust policy platform with the strongest governance and system management capabilities with improved CI/CD support, cloud integration, and policy orchestration.”