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How to choose the right AuthZ and AuthN deployment model

Self-hosted, cloud, or SaaS? Learn how to find the best fit for security, control, and scalability

Dan Moore,Principal Product Engineer at FusionAuth

Alex Olivier,CPO and Co-Founder at Cerbos

April 17, 2025 at 5pm CET / 9am PST

Join us for a webinar where we will guide you through how to choose the right deployment model for authentication and authorization in your application.

Each option - self-hosted, cloud-hosted, and SaaS - impacts security, compliance, performance, and operational control in different ways. Through our experience speaking with hundreds of mid-size enterprises and multi-tenant SaaS companies, we’ve seen a wide range of deployments. In this webinar, we’ll break down the key factors that drive these decisions across different use cases, and explain how to make the right choice for your application.

What you’ll learn

Compliance needs

Understand how each deployment model addresses regulatory compliance and data governance requirements.

• How to understand & manage security and regulatory risk
• Which models support low and high compliance needs
• Vendor expertise vs your expertise

Technical trade-offs

Recognize the engineering implications of each option, from performance trade-offs to integration complexity.

• Team technical capabilities & expertise affect the decision
• How performance needs and throughput SLAs play a role
• Ensuring the model supports your technical roadmap
• Migration escape valves

Operational risks

Identify the operational risks associated with each deployment model and how to mitigate them.

• Uptime reliability, disaster recovery, data breach exposure, and vendor lock-in
• It’s all about tradeoffs: What could go wrong in each option
• Best practices to address these risks

Cost and budget considerations

Understand the total cost of ownership for each approach, including upfront investments, ongoing and hidden expenses.

• How to weigh CapEx vs. OpEx for each option
• Opportunity costs related to each deployment model
• Financially justifying your deployment choice

About the speakers

Dan Moore

Dan is a Principal Product Engineer at FusionAuth and an industry veteran. With 25+ years in tech, he’s been a CTO, engineering manager, trainer, and speaker. He’s written, edited and contributed to five books, including 97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know and Letters To A New Developer.

Alex Olivier

Alex is the CPO and Co-Founder at Cerbos. He has designed enterprise solutions from the ground up as an engineer, consultant, tech lead and product manager. Alex has built platforms which helped teams move faster at scale, with a focus on core components like authorization, data management and security.

Webinar outcomes

Senior developers and software architects will be able to:

• Evaluate and choose the right deployment model
• Reference architectures to integrate the chosen solution
• Avoid common integration pitfalls and manage technical debt

Engineering leaders will be able to:

• Align authN and authZ choices with objectives and capabilities
• Communicate the rationale behind a deployment decision
• Champion a solution that supports growth while managing risk

For product-focused engineers will be able to:

• Know how the model impacts product development and UX
• Understand how authN and authZ choices can enable new features
• Ensure security requirements don’t slow down feature delivery

Download the webinar recording

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Our other educational materials

Building a scalable authorization system: a step-by-step blueprint

A practical guide to setting a strong foundation for your application’s authorization layer. Pulling from our founders’ experience and interviews with over 500 developers, we share the six key requirements that all authorization layers have to include to avoid technical debt, and how we satisfied them while building our authorization layer.

Download the ebook](https://solutions.cerbos.dev/building-a-scalable-authorization-system)