Authorization is the access management aspect that safeguards data by determining a user’s rights to specific resources. Managing Cloud principles describe authorization as the process of enforcing policies that define what actions an authenticated user is permitted to perform within a system.

Once a user’s identity has been authenticated, authorization evaluates roles, permissions, and access rules to decide whether access to a particular resource should be granted or denied. This ensures that users can only access data and services necessary for their job functions, reducing the risk of unauthorized data exposure.

Authentication verifies who the user is, provisioning creates the identity, and centralization relates to identity architecture design. None of these directly determine access rights. Authorization is therefore the key mechanism that enforces least privilege and protects cloud data from improper access.