Permitting an Interconnected Future
Throughout our long (~20 years) careers both Asaf (my awesome co-founder) and I found ourselves constantly rebuilding access control for our products.
At my previous company Rookout- We ended up rebuilding access control over five times; at every turn, we were met with unexpected demands for more roles, features, performance, compliance, security, and overall complexity.
As developers who are passionate about developer tools, we knew that things had to change. Authorization, just like billing, authentication, and databases — is not something one should be building from scratch.
We realized this was a unique point in time where multiple events intersected to create the opportunity that is now Permit.io possible. The explosion of microservices combined with the growing maturity of DevSecOps and authentication (with standards like JWTs) have set the stage for the next step in the IAM waterfall — fullstack authorization and permissions.
Fullstack Permissions
As the space evolves, trends, best practices, and open-source standards (e.g. OPA, OPAL) began to emerge. At Permit we adopt and support these, being strong believers in decoupling policy and code. We also understand that it is not only about decoupling the technology — developers and their fellow stakeholders need end-to-end experiences. Access is the most critical experience of any product — and everyone needs to be able to affect and take part in it.
Fullstack permissions mean empowering developers and users, it means adding UI and low-code next to deep-code and APIs, and most importantly it means you can trust us to make authorization work for you, exactly how you want it — and not just throw some APIs your way.
An Interconnected Future
While a major part of our story is about making developers’ life better — we also note that’s just the beginning, as glimpses of the future through companies like Facebook and Google hint at even greater complexities around the corner.
With more and more applications being used by other applications rather than by human users (Think of Apple’s Siri triggering IFFT to turn on your Xiamoi smart light-bulb), and machine learning agents on the rise, it is clear the matrix of access is only getting more complex.
And as more and more things become interconnected more rapidly, only by creating new standards for authorization, and layering artificial intelligence on top, will we be able to keep up with the needed pace.
The beginning of an amazing journey
Today we’re excited to launch Permit.io out of stealth mode, with the support of our amazing investors NFX and Rainfall, as well a long list of angels and advisors — all coming from the developer-tools space.
Our growing team is already supporting a large open-source project and SaaS service- running in the production environments of industry leaders. And is eager to bring permissions to support the future of software and the internet as an interconnected whole.
To read more about our vision for the future check out the Permit.io blog
