Understanding PlainID

At A Glance

What The Platform Does

Most enterprises manage authentication centrally through an identity provider, but leave authorization embedded inside each application as hard-coded roles and entitlements. PlainID centralises that authorization layer into a single control plane while distributing enforcement across the tech stack. The platform operates around an end-to-end Discover → Manage → Enforce lifecycle:

How The Architecture Works

PlainID separates where policy is managed from where decisions are made, so that authorization can run close to the systems it protects.

Control plane. PlainID Cloud is a SaaS console organised into Tenants, Environments, Scopes and Workspaces. Separate workspaces handle identities, authorization policies and integrations.

Decision plane. Every tenant includes a cloud-hosted Policy Decision Point (PDP). Organisations that need lower latency or want sensitive attribute data to stay inside their network can deploy Policy Authorization Agents (PAAs) in their own environment. A PAA bundles four components:

• A Hybrid Agent that communicates with PlainID Cloud
• A Policy Information Point (PIP) that retrieves attributes from local data sources such as JDBC databases, LDAP, Microsoft Entra ID, REST services, Azure Cosmos DB, MongoDB and Google BigQuery
• A Policy Decision Point (PDP) that returns runtime decisions to applications and services
• A Redis cache for local caching; PlainID recommends a managed Redis service in production and does not currently support Redis Cluster Mode

In a typical request, an application asks its local PDP for a decision, the PDP fetches any missing attributes from the local PIP, and the decision is returned without data leaving the customer’s network. PlainID recommends one PAA per environment. PAAs deploy through a standard Helm chart, as a standalone binary, or on Amazon ECS, and PlainID’s container images are signed and verifiable with Cosign. Credentials for PlainID’s own connections can be pulled from HashiCorp, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault or CyberArk CCP.

Enforcement plane. Pre-built Authorizers and integration patterns extend centrally governed policy across the technical stack. Applications can externalize decisions to local PDPs (Model 1) or leverage Policy Orchestration (Model 2) to translate and synchronize policies natively into systems with embedded access controls (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery) with zero code rewrites.

Agentic edge. PlainID Edge is a customer-deployed component that connects to MCP servers and vector databases, discovering AI tools and data sources and enforcing policy on agent activity.

Where Policies Are Enforced

PlainID’s integrations follow five enforcement patterns.

The Policy Model

PlainID policies answer three questions:

• Who is defined by Dynamic Groups, which are rules over identity attributes, such as all external customers with Gold membership, or all agents owned by the finance team.
• What is defined by Rulesets over asset types and their attributes, combined with permitted actions, such as bank accounts where the owner matches the requesting user, with View and Manage actions.
• When is defined by Conditions based on IP range, identity attributes, request attributes such as authentication method, or platform-specific signals such as a Zscaler device posture profile.

Each policy is either Allow or Deny. For policy-as-code workflows, PlainID supports Structured Rego, a structured form of the Rego language used by Open Policy Agent. Policies can be exported to Structured Rego and imported back through the Management APIs, and exports use a consistent ordering so that changes produce small, reviewable diffs in Git. Structured Rego follows PlainID’s schema: each policy carries a PlainID metadata block, expressions compare attributes with values or with other attributes, and time-based conditions are managed in the console rather than in code.

Agentic AI Capabilities

PlainID treats AI agents as identities in the same policy framework as people and services. Agents are registered in the Identities Workspace with their own attributes, grouped with Dynamic Groups, and governed by the same central policies. The platform applies controls at five points in an agent’s flow:

To prevent “agent superpowers”, PlainID enforces Cross-Identity Authorization (Composed Identity), evaluating the human user, the autonomous agent, the service, and the target asset together in a single authorization decision chain. By binding human user claims to agent identities, PlainID provides on-behalf-of accountability and purpose-bound access.

Use Cases And Industries

PlainID publishes specialized solution blueprints across workforce, customer, and B2B access control; data access control and data privacy compliance; Zero Trust architecture; and securing AI agents, RAG pipelines, and MCP tools.