Today, developers building modern SaaS applications are faced with an increasingly complex trade-off between usability and security. On the one hand, they want users to simply and seamlessly access their applications. On the other, they must prevent access to data and functionality that should not be seen by other users. 

Access patterns and safety controls, particularly in multi-tenant Software as a service (SaaS) apps, are far more complex than traditional consumer applications. Can your SaaS application go from supporting a single user in a team to effortlessly serving thousands of enterprise users via Single sign on (SSO)? Can it offer automation via Application Programming Interfaces (API) keys? Can it support modern fine-grained access controls needed for privacy, security and collaboration before businesses can trust you with their data and workloads?

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I am thrilled to announce the preview of Katanemo’s first service - a powerful identity, and fine-grained permissions system purposefully designed for modern SaaS applications. With Katanemo you can quickly add user and federated authentication to your application, and build powerful privacy and collaboration features via Katanemo’s Role-based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) capabilities, and Resource-based control lists.

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Katanemo offers a holistic approach to identity, privacy, and safe collaboration that empowers developers to focus on what matters most: moving fast in building features and capabilities unique to their business. 

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Katanemo helps product leaders effortlessly serve new usage scenarios, engineering leaders eliminate risky and undifferentiated infrastructure tax to build SaaS applications, and empowering CEOs to upsell via critical enterprise-ready features. 

Who should use Katanemo?

If you want to effortlessly go from supporting small teams to thousands of users in an enterprise, then Katanemo is for you. If you want to ensure that enterprises can quickly trust your application via rich privacy and collaboration features, then Katanemo is for you.

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If you want to enable a platform experience where 3rd party developers innovate with your customers through your APIs, then Katanemo is for you. Katanemo is designed for API-first SaaS application developers to get precious time back in building differentiated features. Our purpose built experience helps developers add critical IAM (Identity and Access Management) capabilities and experiences that are as sticky and delightful as ones offered by AWS, Stripe and Twilio.

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How does Katanemo work at a high-level?

At a high-level the following diagram captures the main actors and key interactions in Katanemo. 

1. Publish an OpenAPI spec and get delightful sign-up and login workflows for a developer's SaaS application.
2. SaaS customers can use self-service tools offered by Katanemo (on behalf of SaaS developers) to manage multi-modal identities (users, SSO, machines, etc.) and construct strictly accurate authorization rules
3. The Katanemo authorization runtime client (ARC) is a light-weight utility that does the intelligent heavy lifting of protecting who can do what on which resource (authorization) - at blazing fast speeds. ARC neatly integrates with popular gateway solutions, or via an SDK where crypto-offload and authorization checks happen.
4. All authorization calls are neatly logged and retained for developers to meet compliance requirements or upsell to enterprises for additional revenue.

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Build enterprise-worthy privacy features, and unlock great collaboration

‍Katanemo is designed to solve key problems on behalf of developers building modern SaaS applications.

1. Unlock adoption and effortlessly scale any enterprise. Building a modern identity experience that provides zero-friction on boarding AND easily scales from small teams to large enterprises is complex. Don't waste precious time building your own identity infrastructure - we've built it for you. 
2. Move upmarket faster via a holistic [systems] approach to safety. Building trust with customers takes years, so don't lose it to in-house application level controls. Katanemo is inspired by our work at AWS to make sure that your services are built for today’s challenges, without building out a crack security team.
3. Empower  developers to do more, faster. Empower  developers to build features they can proudly tell their friends about, and get out of your customers' way while offering them a safe way to store, retrieve and manage security and governance controls. Fully self-service, fully featured.
4. Earn customer trust faster. Katanemo helps your customers achieve privacy and safety via least-privilege access controls with rich visibility mechanisms, without the pain and risks of building it yourself.

And these benefits are delivered via six core features available in Katanemo, unified via delightful workflows and slick APIs so that developers can focus on what's most important to their business: building features and capabilities that differentiate their application from others.

In our opening manifesto, we alked about our motivation to build unified workflows that create meaningful business outcomes for developers. Our first service tries to live up to this mission and eliminates the years of infrastructure design and operational tax on behalf of developers. For more, visit our technical docs to learn about the concepts, APIs and outcomes you can achieve via Katanemo's powerful identity and fine-grained authorization service.

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