OWASP 2025 Global AppSec EU

You have probably heard of success stories using Open Policy Agent for all kinds of authorization problems that focus on the technical merits and challenges. While it is relatively easy to get started when you look at single applications, the game changes as soon as you want to introduce authorization as a platform capability for thousands of applications maintained by hundreds of teams.

We will talk about how Zalando adopted Open Policy Agent and Styra DAS to provide this capability and will shed some light on how we enable enough governance to stay compliant, how to use organisational scale in our favour and how to balance central platform concerns with decentral application concerns.

We’ll touch on the technical integration points in our Platform via OSS Skipper, observability via OpenTelemetry and Styra DAS. We will also talk about the developer experience, the leverage we gain as security teams and how we structure our policies to enable complex business cases across multiple applications.