Users demand seamless and instantaneous experiences. From online banking to streaming platforms, users expect lightning-fast interactions. Behind the scenes, authorization plays a pivotal role in determining what users can access and when. While often overlooked, the latency of these authorization checks can make or break the user experience.

Understanding authorization and latency

Authorization is the process of verifying what actions a user is permitted to perform within an application. Every time you open a document, make a payment, or post a comment, an authorization check occurs. These checks must be both accurate and fast. Latency of authorization refers to the time it takes for this process to complete.

High latency in authorization can lead to delays that frustrate users and hinder system performance. Steve High, Staff Engineer at NTWRK, a Cerbos user, encapsulates the stakes:

“If you imagine 10,000 people trying to buy the same instance of a physical product on our platform at the same time, that's what we have to deal with. Using Cerbos as a sidecar, we’ve been able to get permissions-checking latency down to microseconds… in turn, NTWRK is able to provide a great user experience to our customers, both internal and external.”

But why is it so crucial to minimize this delay?

Why low latency matters

Users are impatient. Multiple studies have shown that even a one-second delay in page load time can result in a significant drop in user satisfaction and conversions. Slow authorization can mean delayed page loads, inactive buttons, or frustrating error messages. In industries like e-commerce, even milliseconds can lead to cart abandonment, hence directly impacting revenue.

High-latency systems consume more resources, slowing down other parts of the application. This inefficiency can increase infrastructure costs and degrade overall performance. Low-latency authorization ensures smooth, uninterrupted workflows across the board, and negates instances of potential downtime.

Applications must handle thousands, even millions, of requests per second. In such scenarios, authorization checks can’t afford to bottleneck the system. Low latency ensures your application can scale without sacrificing speed or reliability. This scalability is essential for growing businesses.

In industries like fintech, SaaS, or e-commerce, speed can be a differentiator. Applications with low-latency authorization deliver superior performance, helping retain users and outpace competitors.

Common causes of high latency in authorization

High latency in authorization often stems from several common issues. One major factor is the reliance on remote authorization services. When authorization checks depend on external services, every check involves a network round trip, which introduces delays and makes performance vulnerable to speed and reliability.

Stateful systems also contribute significantly to latency. These systems store user permissions in databases, meaning each authorization request requires an extra query to retrieve relevant data. As the volume of requests grows, these database lookups can quickly become a bottleneck, especially under high traffic conditions.

Finally, complex authorization logic can slow things down. When permission checks involve multiple layers of conditions, roles, and hierarchies, the system must process each layer before granting or denying access. This increases computational overhead, further delaying the response time for user actions.

How to achieve low latency in authorization

For authorization with low latency, the first step to take, is to deploy authorization close to your application. Running authorization checks within your infrastructure minimizes reliance on external network calls, reducing latency.

Adopting stateless authorization will help as well. Stateless systems process each request independently, avoiding delays caused by state synchronization. As will performing authorization at the edge, closer to users - this cuts down on the time it takes to validate permissions.

Finally, optimizing policy management by regularly updating and streamlining authorization policies will make sure that your checks are efficient and up-to-date.

How Cerbos delivers low latency authorization

For those exploring solutions to achieve low-latency authorization, Cerbos offers a modern, flexible approach. Cerbos performs millions of authorization checks daily, with policy evaluation happening in sub-milliseconds. This level of performance is why businesses trust Cerbos to power their mission-critical applications.

Designed to run within your infrastructure, Cerbos minimizes network latency and delivers sub-millisecond policy evaluations. Its adaptable deployment models—ranging from sidecar to serverless—cater to diverse application needs, ensuring fast and secure authorization at scale.

Cerbos offers an Embedded Policy Decision Point (ePDP), allowing checks to run directly within your app or on end-user devices. This WebAssembly module allows checks to run directly in your application or even on end-user devices. By keeping checks close to the user, latency is minimized, and security is enhanced.

Since Cerbos is stateless - each request is evaluated independently without relying on a database, reducing the need for slow network fan-outs. As Loop’s CTO, Mohsin Kalam, points out:

"We tweak policies and deploy without changing the core application code. Everything works out of the box."

Finally, Cerbos Hub simplifies the management of policies across multiple environments. With centralized control, real-time synchronization and up-to-date policies are ensured, further reducing latency.

Conclusion

According to Gartner, low-latency data processing is becoming a cornerstone of modern applications. Companies investing in such solutions report improved user retention, operational efficiency and ability to scale. By optimizing for low-latency authorization, businesses can provide fast, reliable, and secure services that keep users engaged and competitive in their industries.

Whether you’re scaling a startup or optimizing a mature enterprise, Cerbos provides the tools you need to deliver lightning-fast, secure, and flexible authorization. Learn more about Cerbos.