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title: About access control
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To comply with important regulations such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR, it's necessary to have the ability to control which users have access to specific areas of the system, what [permissions](./permissions.md) they have globally and on certain objects, and a way to monitor [events](../../events) related to user activity.

In authentik, we provide role-based access control (RBAC), an industry standard for managing access control. By carefully designing roles with appropriate permissions, and then assigning those roles to groups, RBAC provides a fine-tuned approach to controlling user access.

RBAC is a way of ensuring the well-known [principal of least privilege](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege) whereby "every module (such as a process, a user, or a program, depending on the subject) must be able to access only the information and resources that are necessary for its legitimate purpose."

To learn more about access control with authentik, refer to these topics:

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