Announcing Opal's Self-service App Catalog

Managing access to resources is a pain.

Discovering resources, requesting access, and then waiting for approval can take days.

We're excited for this new layout of our dashboard which allows people to easily request access, connect to resources, and even create resources that don't yet exist. For us, it's important that our user experience is delightful. As a security company, we want to focus on reducing user friction. In doing so, we hope to increase user adoption and help companies strengthen their security posture.

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A New Workflow for Access Requests

In this new workflow, we guide users in requesting access from start to finish.

First, we make it easy to get a view of all apps and infrastructure, so it's straightforward to find the resources you need. With everything in one place, you can browse all your systems at once.

Once you choose a system, you can bulk select resources to add to your "shopping cart", which allows you to request access for multiple resources at once.

Requesting Group Access

You can also request access to groups that already have a set of configured permissions.

For example, if you’re on the API team, you can directly request access to that team to get approved for any resources that are configured for that team.

In the Opal dashboard, we've simplified the relationship between resources, groups, and users with visualizations.

Here, you can see how the API team is a parent group for four other teams. Having a group hierarchy allows our users to scale access groups without creating group scrawl (i.e., numerous duplicates of the same group, with only slight differences).

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Setting Access Levels and Expiration Criteria

Once you hit request, Opal gives you the option of selecting which access level or role you are requesting access for. This provides the granularity that's useful for your team.

You then have the option to link access to a support ticket or require manager approval.

Finally, Opal completes the process by sending out access requests to the right people, and the progress of the request can be tracked on the Requests page. We'll talk about that in a future post!

About Opal:

Opal is the centralized authorization platform for IT and Infrastructure teams. Deeply integrated with developer infrastructure, SaaS applications, and custom internal tools, Opal enables companies to implement scalable access management.

Want to see it yourself? Contact hello@opal.dev or book a meeting here for a personalized demo.