Roles & Permissions

Role-Based Access Control

Telblu's authorisation model is built on two independent axes: what a user is allowed to do (their role) and where they are allowed to do it (their organisational scope). Every access decision - page load, API call, server function - is evaluated against both.

Role + Organisational Scope

A user's effective permissions are the intersection of the role they hold and the scope that role is bound to. The same role (e.g. Department Leader) can be assigned multiple times to the same user across different departments; each assignment is evaluated independently.

Inheritance chain

Permissions cascade downward through the organisational hierarchy. A role granted at a parent scope is automatically effective at every child scope beneath it - you never need to re-grant access at each level.

Least-privilege access

Telblu enforces least-privilege by default. New users are created with no roles and no scope - they cannot see or act on any data until an administrator makes an explicit assignment. Roles bundle only the permissions required to perform a specific job function, and scope narrows those permissions to the smallest slice of the organisation the user needs.

• Deny by default. Any request without a matching role + scope is rejected at the database layer via row-level security.
• Explicit grants. Access is only granted through named role assignments - never through ad-hoc sharing or per-record ACLs.
• Auditable. Every assignment, change and revocation is written to the audit log with actor, timestamp and previous state.

Default platform roles

Telblu ships with five default roles that map to the most common operating responsibilities in an enterprise. Each role bundles a curated set of permissions and is always assigned within a specific organisational scope.

Permissions matrix

A quick reference for what each default role can do. A green tick means the role holds the permission across its scope; a blue dot means the permission is granted, but limited to the scope the role is bound to (department, workspace, etc.).

Permission evaluation

Telblu evaluates permissions dynamically on every request. There is no cached authorisation state - each API call, page load and server function re-runs the full check against the user's live role assignments and scope bindings.

Organisational scope

Every role assignment is bound to a scope. Scope determines the slice of the organisation the role can act on. Telblu supports four scope levels, each nested inside the one above.

Delegated administration

Platform Administrators do not need to manage every user in every department. Telblu supports delegated administration: an admin can grant a Department Leader the ability to manage users, roles and structure inside their own department - without exposing tenant-wide identity or authentication settings.

Temporary access

Enterprises frequently need to grant time-boxed access - external auditors during a quarter-end review, board members reading the board pack, consultants delivering an implementation, or a colleague covering an absence. Telblu supports temporary permission elevation with mandatory expiry, so short-term access never becomes permanent by accident.

• Mandatory expiry. Every temporary assignment requires a start and end timestamp - indefinite temporary access is not permitted.
• Automatic revocation. At expiry the role assignment is removed by the platform, not by a human. No manual clean-up is required.
• Expiry notifications. The grantor is notified 72 hours before expiry so extensions or a permanent grant can be considered in advance.
• Full audit. Grant, use and revocation events are all recorded with actor, reason and expiry timestamp.

Audit trail

Every permission change in Telblu is written to an append-only audit log. Records cannot be edited or deleted - they can only be read. The audit log captures the actor, target user, event type, previous and next state, timestamp and source IP.

Audit records are retained in full for the life of the tenant and are exportable in CSV or JSON for downstream SIEM, compliance and internal-audit tooling.

Security best practices

The following guidance is drawn from customer implementations and enterprise security reviews. Apply it during initial rollout and revisit each recommendation at every quarterly access review.

Enterprise example

The diagram below models a mid-market technology company - Northwind Analytics, ~850 employees - showing how role and scope assignments flow from the CEO down to individual contributors and read-only viewers.

Related documentation

Continue building your reference model of the Telblu platform with the following guides. Each document is written for enterprise administrators, solution architects and implementation teams, and connects back to the modules described on this page.