Cloudentity, an identity and user management platform, has recently taken steps to improve the security and privacy of user data by harnessing the power of GraphQL.
GraphQL is a query language for APIs, allowing users to define the data type they need and get only that data from the server. By adding fine-grained data control capabilities to its platform, Cloudentity ensures that user data is kept secure and private from the moment it is created.
This article will explore in further detail how Cloudentity is taking advantage of the GraphQL query language to control data on its platform and the benefits it brings for their users.
Cloudentity adds fine-grained data control by embracing GraphQL
GraphQL, a query language created by Facebook in 2012, provides an alternative to traditional REST APIs. It is constantly being improved and adopted by many companies, including Cloudentity. GraphQL allows clients to send a structured query specifying which data fields are needed for a request. This gives users more fine-grained control over their data and can significantly reduce client-server round trips, saving time and resources.
GraphQL exposes an API endpoint where queries can be sent in a POST request body with the following parameters: query, variables, operationName, and directives. The API then resolves the query into response data returned in JSON format. This allows clients to optimise their calls as they know exactly what data they get back in each call.
In addition to providing better control over requested data, GraphQL allows clients to move away from tightly coupled architectures by creating reusable schema definitions that can be shared across different applications or services. For example, with GraphQL schemas Cloudentity can safely share their public facing API endpoints while keeping their internal APIs safely secured behind authentication layers or other authorization protocols like OAuth 2.0 or JWT tokens. This offers Cloudentity greater flexibility when managing user access to protected endpoints and greatly reduces the risk of unauthorised access of protected information due to incorrect authorization rules not being enforced at the API level.
How is Cloudentity using GraphQL?
Cloudentity is a company that provides fine-grained control over business data across distributed applications and services. Over the past year, Cloudentity has embraced GraphQL as a technology for controlling data access, transformation, and delivery. In taking such a step, Cloudentity hopes to empower enterprise software developers with the ability to control their data in unique ways that traditional approaches cannot offer.
At its core, GraphQL is an open-source query language created by Facebook which allows server-client communication with an API layer between the two. This API layer serves as a bridge between the client and server, allowing developers to define how end users interact with their application’s data and control who has access and at what levels of granularity do they have it. By coupling that access model with a schema definition language, information can be translated into consistent types for further manipulation and authorization purposes.
With GraphQL’s strong support for robust type systems and its built-in caching capabilities, Cloudentity can leverage all these capabilities to provide fine-grained control over business data without sacrificing performance or developers’ productivity. Furthermore, GraphQL follows specified standards from other technologies such as Apache Kafka and TensorFlow it allows easy integration with those existing systems which helps speed development cycles while also providing additional controls over large datasets either spread across multiple databases or through streaming applications like Apache Kafka.
By embracing GraphQL Cloudentity provides powerful tools which allow developers to shape how their end users interact with data through highly granular rules that can be adjusted quickly requiring no code changes on already set up applications resulting in better experiences across applications while keeping security intact upon any change done onto the rules set up around different datasets in real time making it easy to respond quickly to any threats appearing on production environments reducing security incidents stemming from possible misconfigurations or breaches changing how developers interact with their application’s data forever adding layers of defence along side full control over every aspect of an application’s datasets.
Benefits of GraphQL
Cloudentity is the latest company to join many organisations that have embraced GraphQL as their data access layer. GraphQL offers an intuitive way of controlling data, allowing developers to specify the exact data needed, allowing for more granular control of requests.
This article will explore the benefits of using GraphQL as a data access layer.
Faster data fetching
One of the biggest benefits of using GraphQL is the ability to precisely control what data is being fetched from a server. This means that operations are faster, since developers can retrieve only the specific data they require and nothing more. With traditional REST APIs, developers have to make multiple trips to the server to receive all of the data for a single query — often resulting in longer response times and higher latency.
Cloudentity adds fine-grained data control by embracing GraphQL. Instead of making multiple requests when retrieving data, a query sent via GraphQL allows developers to specify which fields they want returned from an entity. This makes it easy to reduce redundant queries and optimise server requests for your application since you’re only pulling the entities you need most from the server. In addition, this makes it much easier to manage large datasets since the amount of data transported between client and server can be small compared with traditional REST-based applications.
Improved scalability
Cloudentity adds fine-grained data control by embracing GraphQL, one of the industry’s powerful query languages—on top of existing REST and OData protocols—to simplify and improve scalability. GraphQL allows developers to provision exact amounts of data up front, reducing roundtrip time for subsequent requests. Fewer roundtrips and refinements also reduce network usage, improving performance.
GraphQL also provides better visibility into backend services as it distributes a service’s contract language to clients, which results in better understanding by the client on what that service should do. In addition, the technology effectively makes training easier and faster due to its static typed interface allowing the client and server to reach consensus quickly on how much data is needed, reducing boilerplate coding in both directions such as contracts, service virtualization software (aka mocks).
Finally with Cloudentity, using GraphQL offers developers a layer of abstraction so they can switch between different backends without modifying code significantly while maintaining data consistency across applications as it evolves. With these capabilities Cloudentity increases flexibility to support multiple backend sources with any implementation requiring minor changes to their existing approach.
Improved security
Cloudentity’s embrace of GraphQL brings substantial improvements to the security of enterprise data. Traditionally, organisations fielded APIs allowing users with a valid API key to access data on their behalf. This approach is evidence of an all-or-nothing security model, where all API users have unrestricted access to an application’s data.
GraphQL brings fine-grained control over enterprise data by requiring each API user to specify which fields they wish to interact with on a resource before being granted permission. This ensures that API users only have access to the required data, reducing their risk during malicious attacks and providing organisations with peace of mind that their internally sensitive information is secure.
Additionally, Cloudentity implements role-based access control (RBAC) via the GraphQL Protocol layer to ensure that only users with valid credentials can access sensitive resources through Connections managed by Cloudentity Hubs.
Cloudentity’s GraphQL Implementation
As Cloudentity continues to modernise their technology, they have recently implemented GraphQL to give users more control over their data.
GraphQL is a query language for APIs designed to provide precise and efficient retrieval and manipulation of data.
In this article, we will look at how Cloudentity is leveraging GraphQL to give users greater control over their data.
Security Architecture
Cloudentity’s security architecture implements several technical components, providing an enterprise-grade access control solution measured in microseconds. But the foundation of our security architecture rests on GraphQL (GQL).
At its core, our GQL implementation is designed to make data and identity management easier, faster and more secure. Using GraphQL instead of traditional REST APIs to communicate with different systems, Cloudentity can readily incorporate Application Programming Interfaces (API) from many different vendors without creating custom code for each one–enabling much faster integration.
But importantly, the GQL architectural pattern allows us to define at a very granular level what data particular users can access. Specifically this is enabled by the authentication & authorization method used in GraphQL–called “schema delegation”–which enables the authorization server or client application role to determine who can execute certain operations or access certain pieces of data. This structure makes it possible for user roles and other pieces of identity-related information to have visibility into our policies and rules used for authentication & authorization purposes throughout all applications built in our platform. So enterprises can create policies granting users personal access and group-based access without having them grant unique privileges individually for every application they authenticate with.
In essence, by embracing GraphQL’s schema delegation approach to execute permissions at the Subgraph level (the block inside ACID transactions) Cloudentity adds fine grain control over how data is exposed across systems yet maintained secure from malicious actors. This fine grained control over single record updates within transactions provides enterprises an additional level of granularity when trying to define “who can do what”— regardless of system or technology boundaries thus providing customers with an enhanced security layer that keeps attackers from gaining critical information from unintended sources while still enabling secure multi tenant interactions inside Cloudentity’s platform.
Data Access Control
Cloudentity adds fine-grained data access control through its implementation of GraphQL. With GraphQL’s powerful query language, users can craft queries to access only the data needed for their application. This means that instead of large-scale generalised access control, users can specify exactly which objects and fields they want access to at any given time. Cloudentity utilises this capability to provide its users with even more granular data control options.
The ability to move beyond standard user roles and permissions grants unprecedented levels of control over every aspect of a system’s data when using Cloudentity’s platform. Utilising the capabilities of GraphQL gives cloud entities extremely precise and secure control over who can access what data in their applications, resulting in enhanced visibility, better performance and improved security.
More specifically, implementing GraphQL allows various pieces of data from multiple sources to be accessible through one common interface according to user-defined criteria or policies. This approach allows for many different customizations, including implementing fine-grained authorization for specific objects or fields and massive scalability for large enterprise systems utilising cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Thanks to this precision accuracy, Cloudentity can also guarantee consistent runtime and performance characteristics among all its customers, regardless of the size or complexity nature of their applications. Additionally, with this level of accurate data control, cloud entities are provided with unprecedented flexibility when it comes to controlling the access of their systems’ data and identity management capabilities.
GraphQL Queries
At its core, GraphQL is a query language for APIs, providing a contract for how clients can request data from servers and what the response looks like. This enables developers to request only the data they need in one query, making apps more efficient and ensuring no ‘over-fetching’ of data occurs.
With Cloudentity’s GraphQL implementation, businesses can use fine-grained access control over an organisation’s vast datasets. By setting access control parameters within points in the query itself, Cloudentity can ensure that apps only receive the permitted data.
Cloudentity makes this possible by tightly coupling access control to GraphQL queries. This process works by inspecting each query and mapping it against an existing set of policies to determine how much of a backend dataset should be exposed. This distinct approach affords developers unprecedented specificity in designating which underlying records can be queried and returned without dialling down large APIs or filtering records on the client side with vanilla authorization approaches.
In situations where dynamic renders or complex UIs require data from multiple sources, Cloudentity enables developers to save time by utilising a single request cycle – simplifying their ability to make hierarchical traversal requests using Query Variables along with Cloudentity-hardened GraphQL queries that can render disparate datasets concurrently while upholding the highest levels of access control protections.
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