11 authorization and IAM trends you’ll see in 2025

When we created Cerbos 4 years ago, authorization was a quiet corner of the IAM industry. Recently, that’s begun to change. More people are coming up to us at conferences, and the conversations we’re having with them are different than last year, or the year before.

Just last year our team gathered insights at more than 20 dev conferences, including DevWorld Amsterdam, KubeCon EU, and Gartner IAM, along with almost daily calls with users interested in the authorization solutions.

Over the years, we’ve talked with hundreds of architects, IAM leads, CISOs, and tech execs from companies of all sizes about their needs in authorization, zero-trust architecture, and IAM.

From these insights and our expertise as an enterprise authorization provider, we’ve identified eleven trends that will change the authorization industry in 2025.

1. Authorization is gaining mindshare

Last year, we attended, sponsored and presented at 20+ conferences. While chatting with attendees, we noticed a shift in the attention authorization is getting.

At industry events, more people were approaching us to talk about authorization. In these conversations, we were happy to note that authorization challenges didn’t need an introduction anymore. Similar trends emerged in discussions with our users and prospects. The Gartner IAM conference in Texas further convinced us things were changing. Authorization, and its role in zero trust security, was prominently highlighted in many Gartner presentations.

To test this shift, our team analyzed 120+ developers' conference talks on security, IAM, DevOps, and language-specific topics. This revealed a significant increase in authorization talks and workshops in 2024 compared to 2023. Even big enterprise companies, like AWS and Microsoft, have started talking about authorization.

We believe authorization will continue drawing attention in the development and enterprise space through 2025.

2. Movement to authorization standardization

In 2024, standardizing authorization became a key focus for us and the industry as a whole. Two OpenID Foundation working groups (WG) met throughout the year to standardize AuthZ.

The OpenID Foundation's AuthZEN WG, which we’re members of, brought together leading authorization vendors to:

• define common communication protocols between policy enforcement points and policy decision points (PDP)
• establish AuthZEN as a standard for modern authorization
• promote externalized authorization

Just as OpenID Connect revolutionized authentication, AuthZEN will smooth integration and provide consistent ways to handle permissions, enabling seamless integration across systems.

The Shared Signals WG also met to advance standards for sharing authorization and identity events through frameworks such as the Shared Signals Framework.

This authorization standardization effort will eventually lead to a broader adoption of externalized authorization solutions, like Cerbos.

3. The changing conversation of buy vs. build

No one builds an authentication system anymore. Companies simply buy an AuthN system that fits their needs.

We believe authorization is headed in a similar direction for corporate and multinational companies. This growing demand for externalized authorization is driven by:

1. the increasingly complex needs of enterprise clients
2. the rising cost of building authorization layers in-house

Complexity

Today’s corporate users are facing complex regulations. Laws differ based on region, and new laws and compliance regulations are ushered in every year. As a result, multinational companies are requesting more granular, auditable, easily scalable, and flexible permission management systems. They need permissions that will easily adapt to these changing laws, multi-national compliance regulations, and regional business requirements. This increasing complexity will make it more difficult to build an authorization layer in-house through 2025 and beyond.

Cost

In 2024, interest rates climbed as venture funding dried up. As a result, we're seeing enterprises and scale-ups become more critical of where they're investing time, resources, and money. They’re choosing to focus expensive development time on revenue-generating product initiatives. So, they are more willing to invest in out-of-the-box solutions that solve foundational issues, like authorization, that directly impact the quality of their core business offering.

For companies with multinational or corporate clients, the build vs. buy conversation will become more straightforward in 2025. We believe the value of buying a third-party authorization layer will exceed the complex, expensive process of building in-house for most. Essentially, corporate reality will look even more like our comics.

While these two trends are driving corporations to buy off-the-shelf solutions, the conversation is different for small businesses. For 2025, we see small businesses and early-stage startups continuing to build simple editor/viewer/admin permission systems in-house.

4. Simplified policy changes

Setting permission system requirements and implementing those permissions have always been split between departments. First, business users (product managers, product owners) or software architects decide who has access to which resources. Then, they send those authorization requirements to operators (developers), who implement the authorization logic along with any needed changes in the code. Over the course of this year, we’re going to see this process begin to change.

Instead of requiring two departments, permission policy changes will be simplified to a single step. New, third-party authorization layers will empower business users, who own the requirements or directly interact with clients, to make policy changes themselves.

Rather than having to raise a ticket with a dev team, who might be busy with other tasks in their sprint, authorization vendors will enable non-developers to make those changes in plain language on the spot. So PMs, technical PMMs, IAM leads, security teams, and, in some cases, even CS or sales teams will be able to change permission policies faster.

This comes in very handy with the rapidly changing global compliance regulations companies will most likely face in 2025. It also makes expansion and restructuring easier by making ad-hoc changes at the roles and attributes level easier.

As one of the Gartner analysts said at the Gartner IAM summit, “Making authorization more dynamic, makes the organization more dynamic - since all valuables require authorization.” And we are fully supporting this trend.

5. More user-friendly authorization UIs

As business users start to change permission directly, we’ll see third-party providers tailor their products to these new user cases. Broadly, this will include more powerful authorization UIs for editing permission policies.

The main driver behind this trend is the competition between off-the-shelf authorization providers. In the past, when companies built their own authorization layers in-house, adding these kinds of features took too much time for internal dev teams. Developers had to focus their time on furthering the main business objectives.

Competition among AuthZ providers will push them to offer more feature-rich products. And, considering that business users are more willing to make policy changes, a key feature on many of those vendor’s roadmaps will be a user-friendly interface for policy editing that doesn’t require any understanding of code.

So making authorization policy changes will be easier and quicker for companies who choose to use third-party authorization solutions.

6. Using LLMs for permission policy generation

As we move into 2025, LLMs will enable users to turn plain language into policy. This trend reflects the growing adoption of AI tools in software development. In fact, 76% of engineers are using or plan to use AI copilots in their workflow, according to the StackOverflow 2024 Developer Survey.

Based on conversations with developers at conferences, we know this is true in the authorization space as well. Many developers are currently using tools like Visual Studio Copilot to speed up their workflow when writing policies in YAML files. But as business users take over the creation of permissions, they’re going to use other tools more suited to their skill set.

We’re already seeing these users ask popular LLMs, like ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, and Sonnet, to create permissions matrices. And for the most part, they are capable of generating permission policies from plain language prompts.

However, these systems don’t always produce perfect, copy-and-paste-ready results. But, they are becoming remarkably accurate in understanding formats and permission policy structures. We believe LLMs will continue to get more accurate through 2025.

7. The growing need for RAG authorization

The last couple of years have seen explosive growth in the evolution of AI agents, chatbots and assistants. Many companies have been prototyping and evaluating enterprise AI use cases, especially with AI companions powered by Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). The increase of companions in 2024 (like Notion AI, Zoom AI companion, Humaans AI Companion, Otter AI Chat, and others) demonstrates the product value of AI for business use cases.

While some major companies have released AI companions, many companies are still in the prototype/PCO stage. This will change in 2025. We believe this will be the year of productionizing enterprise AI. And we’re not alone in that. According to Deloitte, 25% of enterprises using generative AI are expected to deploy AI agents by 2025. This number is expected to grow to 50% by 2027.

This mass productionization, and the attack surfaces it exposes, will reveal new vulnerabilities and security threats. We’ve covered many of the risks of unrestricted AI access on our blog, CNCF community, and many industry conferences & meetups, including at our London AI meetups last December with our CPO Alex Olivier.

OWASP has also extensively covered these new vulnerabilities. In a recent, comprehensive report, they detail a variety of new security risks that GenAI apps are vulnerable to. We highly recommend checking it out.

As companies move forward with production-ready, RAG-based AI agents, they will be forced to grapple with these new vulnerabilities. Due to this, we see the demand for strong permission management for AI agents, bots and other RAG or AI-based systems growing in 2025. We think that context-aware data filtering as a prevention and mitigation strategy will start to attract more attention.

In fact, we’re already seeing this. Many of our users today are considering adding Cerbos to make the most of RAG-enhanced LLMs while avoiding security pitfalls.

8. AI for audit log analysis

Debugging and analyzing audit logs is time-consuming, but essential work. With our open-source authorization layer, Cerbos PDP, developers can pull audit logs and funnel them into their preferred data store. Then, they can do their own analysis, reading through logs in an effort to find patterns and pinpoint vulnerabilities.

In 2025, we’ll see more and more companies using AI to audit logs and analyze why authorization decisions were made and what policy changes should be made. AI’s role will fall into two categories: proactive optimization and reactive security enhancement.

AI’s ability to analyze vast amounts of data will allow users to proactively optimize permission policy and enhance their least-privilege model. So instead of poring over logs and data, developers will push that data to an AI companion. Then, it will analyze user behaviour, resource access patterns, and historical authorization decisions to see where the rule of least privilege can be optimized.

For example, after going through logs, AI may detect that a particular role has access to sensitive data that the user never accesses. The AI may then recommend revoking access to minimize the risk of data breaches. The developer responsible for the permission management can then choose to make the change.

AI will also start identifying anomalies and suspicious patterns in real-time log analysis. So, it will be able to alert security teams to potential threats as they are happening. For example, AI could detect multiple failed login attempts from an unusual location. It can then alert the security team so they can respond quickly to potential breaches and mitigate risks effectively.

9. Fine-grained authorization is a must-have for 2025

As businesses expand into new regions, the challenges of navigating global compliance and geopolitics expand. Each country has its own laws and compliance requirements that differ from its neighbors. Even within countries regulations change. California, and its California Privacy Protection Agency is a great example of this.

As a result of all these regulations, we’re seeing a growing demand for fine-grained authorization frameworks.

While smaller companies might get by with basic role-based models, larger enterprises need more flexibility. Multinationals will need software that can handle complex organizational structures—departments, geographical areas, teams, or even tenant-specific boundaries—directly within applications.

To make it even more complex, each organization has its own way of defining roles and managing access. This makes fine-grained authorization a critical requirement.

So, more granular permissions, fine-grained checks, and more abilities to do per-tenant customization are the growing areas of demand we're seeing right now. And it's only going to be accelerating into this year.

10. The move towards ABAC

Increased product complexity, along with ever-changing requirements of global compliance are all testing the limits of role-based access controls. As new complexities continue to put new strains on RBAC systems in 2025, we’re going to see more companies move away from it.

The problem is that the quick way to react to these increasingly complex requests in an RBAC system is to create new, more granular roles. For each new requirement, a new role is created to deal with it. Some companies we’ve spoken with now have more roles in their system than they have users. This increase in roles is forcing companies to come up with increasingly complex role names, like US_managers_California_admins_etc. Both the length of the role names and the number of names within a system have a technical breaking point.

More to the point, these kludgy solutions are a sign to the engineering team that they're hitting the limitations of their system. So as this complexity grows in 2025, we’re going to see more enterprise companies start to move toward a more flexible, ABAC-based system.

These companies will move to make authorization decisions based on context and attributes about the person and the resource to escape the problem of role explosion. This will give them a more flexible, data-driven model that makes decisions based on the actual user, their context, where they are in the world, and so on.

11. Non-human identities and delegated access

The increase in AI agents and automated workflows creates complex new challenges in authorization. These non-human entities act on behalf of users but are not the users themselves. This leaves them in a grey area of authorization. Should they inherit the same permissions the user has? Should they have their own permissions based on their specific task? The authorization industry hasn’t come to an agreement on these questions yet. This uncertainty creates weak points in otherwise secure systems.

In 2025, we believe the industry will define standards and best practices to answer these questions.

Once there are answers to these questions, enterprises will have to implement these standards for delegated workflows in their authorization layer. This may include enforcing stricter controls, ensuring proper audit trails, and defining clear boundaries for what non-human entities can access.

With this change, the demand for solutions that can handle these complex issues and maintain compliance with zero-trust principles will grow. We see this as a major area of innovation going forward into 2025.

We are proud to shape the future of authorization

As founders of Cerbos, we are proud to be part of the growing authorization industry. Together with other vendors, we believe we’re helping create a more secure space for companies to flourish. But mostly, we are excited to see the AuthZ space growing and getting its deserved place on the IAM table.

If you’d like to see how we can help you increase the security and flexibility of your authorization layer, and proactively take on these trends, book a call with us, or take a look at our users’ success stories.