Centralized Access Control with Microsoft Entra and Open Policy Agent

With Microsoft Entra and Open Policy Agent (OPA), you can centralize access control and enforce consistent policies across every service and workload. This pairing brings identity management from Entra together with OPA’s declarative policy language, giving you a single source of truth for authorization.

Microsoft Entra handles authentication and identity verification. It knows who the user is, what groups they belong to, and what roles they hold. OPA decides what those users can do based on fine-grained rules written in Rego. This separation of concerns makes your architecture cleaner and easier to audit. Authentication and policy evaluation stay independent yet connected.

To integrate OPA with Microsoft Entra, you place OPA as a policy decision point in your infrastructure. Your applications send authorization requests to OPA containing the user claims from Entra’s issued tokens. OPA evaluates those claims against your Rego policies and returns an allow or deny result. Rego policies can enforce RBAC, ABAC, compliance controls, or any custom logic you need. This approach scales across microservices, APIs, and cloud infrastructure.

Key benefits of Microsoft Entra with OPA:

• Unified policy enforcement across diverse systems.
• Improved security posture through central governance.
• Rapid iteration on rules without redeploying apps.
• Audit readiness with a single, queryable policy source.

Best practices include keeping policies under version control, using Entra’s role claims as primary inputs, and testing edge cases against OPA’s decision logs. Deploy OPA close to the workloads it serves to reduce latency. For distributed systems, consider OPA sidecars or the OPA REST API depending on scale and topology.

Microsoft Entra Open Policy Agent integration is not just a feature upgrade—it is a foundation for zero-trust access control. By making authorization explicit and portable, you cut risk and gain agility.

See how this works in minutes. Build and test Microsoft Entra + OPA authorization live with hoop.dev and bring secure, centralized policies to your stack today.