Authorization for legacy applications

Add policy-based authorization, audit trails, and context-aware access control to the systems your team has been telling you can't be governed.

Book a call

Try Cerbos

Security

Engineering

IAM

Eliminate your biggest authorization blind spot

Legacy systems hold your most sensitive data with the least visibility. Get a full audit trail across legacy and modern systems in one place.

Always know who can access what

Gain real-time visibility into access across systems that were previously ungoverned. Role, device posture, risk score, location, all factored into every decision.

Prove compliance at any time

Produce audit evidence for legacy systems in seconds. Decision logs meeting SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, NIS2, DORA, FedRAMP requirements.

Deploy in an afternoon, enforce when you're ready

Start in observe mode with no deny rules. See how the system is actually used. Write policies based on real access patterns. Move to enforcement on your timeline.

Same policy language you already use

Write route-level policies in YAML with CEL conditions. Same Cerbos policy framework as your modern services, just a different integration point.

No one comes back to you for permission changes

Security and identity teams manage policies in Cerbos Hub. Role changes happen in the IdP. No code deploys, no engineering tickets for access updates.

Extend your governance reach to legacy systems

Gain visibility into what every identity can do inside apps your IAM stack has never been able to govern. Your IdP becomes the source of truth for access.

Close the JML lifecycle gap

Your IGA provisions roles. Cerbos controls what roles can do at the resource level, at runtime. When someone changes roles or leaves, access updates on the next request.

One authorization view across your entire estate

See every access decision for legacy and modern systems in the same place. No more fragmented authZ logic outside your governance reach.

Legacy applications are the biggest authorization risk

They hold the most sensitive data but sit outside every governance framework.

No visibility into who accesses what

Access logs sit in files on a VM somewhere, if they exist at all. Security and identity teams have no structured record of who's using these systems, what they're accessing, or whether that access is appropriate.

Authorization outside your governance reach

Access controls are hardcoded by whoever built the application years ago. Your IdP assigns roles, but those roles don't reach the permissions inside the app. The JML lifecycle has a gap that auditors will find.

Compliance evidence you can't produce

Auditors ask "who has access to what in this system?" and the answer is a scramble. No structured audit trail. No policy-as-code. No way to demonstrate consistent enforcement across the estate.

dynamic-auth-for-mcp-servers-illustration

“$52 million settlement. 131 million users exposed. Multi-year breach.”

- Marriott International, 2024

The root cause was failure to implement proper access controls.

Cerbos adds authorization governance to your entire estate, including legacy applications

A single authorization platform for modern services, infrastructure, and legacy applications you can't modify.

See exactly who's accessing what across every system, including legacy applications that previously had no audit trail. Deploy in observe mode and get a complete record of every access decision from day one. Write enforcement policies based on real access patterns, not guesswork.

How Utility Warehouse achieved continuous compliance across thousands of services and millions of NHIs with Cerbos.

4,500 services

Millions of decisions daily

SOC 2 & ISO audit-ready

“We had no idea what our services were doing on behalf of users. Once a request passed the edge, the identity and the intent got lost. Now even our legacy apps follow the same access rules as our microservices. Cerbos gives us one model to rule them all, whether it's new code or old vendors.”

Read customer story