Bloomberg backs AuthZEN with funding to boost cloud security
Bloomberg has joined the OpenID Foundation and committed dedicated funding to support the development of AuthZEN, an emerging authorisation standard designed to support zero-trust cloud infrastructure for enterprises.
Focused contribution
The financial technology company's membership includes directed financial support explicitly aimed at advancing AuthZEN. This standard addresses the need for rapid and accurate authorisation in environments where zero-trust architectures have become the norm. Zero-trust models require strict identity and access controls, making standardised authorisation approaches a critical component.
Supporting open standards
AuthZEN provides a mechanism for organisations to make authorisation decisions in distributed cloud systems with consistency and interoperability. Bloomberg said it will help support the creation of conformance tests and interoperability demonstrations related to the standard. The development efforts will take place under the OpenID Foundation's intellectual property framework, and final outputs will be publicly available.
Bloomberg representatives described the company's reliance on open source technologies and the value of open standards in scaling complex infrastructure.
"At Bloomberg, we've embraced an open source-first tech stack in which we employ hundreds of different open source projects to power the complex pipelines, workloads, and applications our engineering and product teams are building. An open standard like AuthZEN will only make it easier for a firm like ours to quickly plug in new open source projects that introduce new capabilities and functionality into our distributed infrastructure at scale," said Phil Vachon, Head of Infrastructure in the Office of the CTO, Bloomberg.
Planned activities
Bloomberg's funding will be directed toward developing conformance tests for AuthZEN, as well as an interoperability event scheduled for later this year. The OpenID Foundation intends the outputs of this work, including code and documentation, to be freely accessible to the wider technology community.
Industry collaboration
The OpenID Foundation said Bloomberg's backing highlights the importance of industry collaboration in developing and deploying open standards.
"Bloomberg's enthusiasm to lead and their commitment to directed funding for AuthZEN will accelerate conformance test development and interoperability capabilities. Its investment demonstrates how industry leaders can drive meaningful progress in open standards. We look forward to its team's contributions to our working groups and leadership in driving adoption of these important standards that will benefit the entire community," said Gail Hodges, Executive Director, OpenID Foundation.