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# Introduction

## History must not be repeated 

Previous experience had taught Senior Engineer David Workman, and Chuck Hardy, Head of Engineering, that while it was easy to cobble together an adequate authorization system at first, it can cause a lot of complexity down the road. 

“We implemented an in-house authorization system at my previous company. It kind of did the job but was difficult to update. It couldn’t support all the use cases, and we never had time to develop it after release. This caused a lot of confusion and we often worried it wasn’t working correctly,” David recalls. 

Beyond the inconvenience, the cost of building an authorization system from the ground up was astronomical. Chuck explains, **“When I did an audit, I found that the cost of managing authorization and authentication in-house over the entire lifespan of the company was in the seven figures.”**

With the benefit of hindsight, David knew that if he didn’t implement a reliable and scalable authorization system at the outset, the problem would only get bigger as Salesroom scaled.
 

# Business Needs

## A scalable solution fit for enterprise clients 

Authorization systems for enterprise clients usually require conditions for geographies, departments and hierarchies. Setting it up to begin with can get complicated, but maintaining it and updating it even more so. Enterprise tech buying teams will have high standards on security, scalability, and availability. So you have to demonstrate that your product is airtight, flexible to changing requirements, and guarantee infallible service. 

“If you want to sell to big companies, you can't have tedious or fragile disaster recovery programs.” says Chuck Hardy, “You have to be able to prove, not only where your data is flowing, but also that you control the foundations of the house.”

In pursuit of an enterprise-ready solution, the first thing the Salesroom team were worried about was implementing something that was outside their control in the case of outages. “Every interaction with the platform could be making a call to Cerbos for authorization needs - potentially hundreds of times in a single request.” David explains, “So if we had, say, only one instance of Cerbos running that could go down separately from the application, then at that point, our application, even if all of our code is up and running, no longer works.” 

**“We can't use something that is a single point of failure. It's too much of a risk to add to the company,”** Chuck adds. Additionally, Chuck and David needed to solve for the pain points of the past. 
* They needed something that would make it easy to write and update policies, potentially without engineering support. 
* They needed a way to test their policies and monitor the authorization system so they know at any given moment that it’s doing its job. 
* And they needed something that would integrate easily with their existing systems. 
 <a href=" https://cerbos.dev/blog/designing-an-authorization-model-for-an-enterprise" target="_blank">Read more about designing an authorization model for an enterprise.</a>

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<a href="https://cerbos.dev/use-cases/enterprise-ready" target="_blank">Read more about the enterprise use-case for Cerbos.</a>
 

# Results

## Peace of mind, and bandwidth for what matters most

David is thrilled that he doesn’t have to change the application code whenever he wants to update a policy. “I don't have to look at code or a bunch of database queries to see if something’s working right or not. I can just make a few small changes without touching the application code,” he states.

**David and his team of engineers spend almost no time maintaining and updating policies. In fact, they’ve been able to hand the job over to non-engineers.** 
 

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For Chuck, taking a large workload off of the engineering team is a huge relief because it means they have more time to focus on building the best possible video conferencing platform for their customers. **“I categorized it as just one of those things I don't have to think about. And that's a very valuable thing,” Chuck says, “Deploying Cerbos has allowed our engineers to spend their time on what really matters for Salesroom’s success. And I sleep better at night.”**

The product and leadership teams at Salesroom have total visibility into the policies that they write in Cerbos. This helps them understand persona permissioning and make better decisions about how to shape features. And it supports their ability to serve enterprise clients with strict auditing requirements. “We can look at the policies and have a good idea of what they're doing and whether they're doing it correctly. We’re not worried about giving access to the wrong people,” David says. 

“Leave authorization to Cerbos,” says Chuck, “There is no external single point of failure, so your main excuse is void. Doing it on your own from scratch, and scaling it will cost you more than you think. Focus your time and energy on finding PMF,” he concludes.

### Related links
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/how-cerbos-helps-salesroom-simplify-and-scale-access-control-quickly-and-securely">Full interview Chuck Hardy and David Workman</a>
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/how-utility-warehouse-upgraded-and-centralized-its-access-control-system-with-cerbos">Utility Warehouse synchronizes authorization across 4,500 services</a>
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/customers/ntwrk">NTWRK makes a complex access control system easy to manage with Cerbos</a>
### Learn more about Cerbos
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/support-enterprise-organizations">Supporting enterprise requirements with Cerbos</a>
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/cerbos-playground">Cerbos Playground</a>
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/scalability">Scalability</a>
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/ecosystem">SDKs and integrations</a>
* <a href="https://www.cerbos.dev/features-benefits-and-use-cases/advanced-observability">Advanced observability</a>

Clean and orderly permissions logic at scale

Unlimited redundancies, no single point of failure

Authorization maintenance reduced to almost nothing

An interactive video conferencing startup built a reliable, low-maintenance, enterprise-ready authorization layer with a fraction of the effort they expected.

Customer success story: Cerbos helps Salesroom save over $1MM worth of developer time

Salesroom

Deploying Cerbos has allowed our engineers to spend their time on what really matters for Salesroom’s success. And I sleep better at night.

With Cerbos, non-engineers can write, update, and audit policies, which frees up our engineers for other important tasks,

Success story

Cerbos helps Salesroom save over $1MM worth of developer time

Case Study