Securing the Sound of AI: How AudioStack Scales Trust with Oso

Inside AudioStack: Where AI Meets Audio Production

AudioStack is one of the world’s leading end-to-end enterprise solutions for AI audio production. The company’s proprietary technology connects AI-powered media creation forms such as script generation, text-to-speech, speech-to-speech, generative music and dynamic versioning. This allows enterprises to build complex audio production workflows substantially  faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods—without compromising on quality. Customers include AWS Marketplace, iHeart Radio, News Corp, Omnicom Media Group, and Publicis Groupe.

As CTO and co-founder of AudioStack, Peadar Coyle is responsible for security, performance, infrastructure, and vendor selection across the platform. He works closely with AudioStack’s head of engineering, who leads a 40+ person team distributed across sites in Barcelona and London.

The Hidden Engine Behind Audio: Authorization

At AudioStack, authorization isn't just a security requirement—it’s a foundational layer that enables the company to serve complex, highly regulated enterprise customers. With clients in media and advertising, projects frequently involve external collaborators, such as agencies or freelance artists, alongside internal stakeholders like producers, legal, IT, and executive teams. Each group requires different levels of access to sensitive creative assets with clear boundaries and full auditability.

What makes this especially challenging is that access rules are not static. Permissions shift as projects evolve: freelance access must be revoked at project completion; legal teams may need view-only rights for compliance; IT requires full visibility for security oversight. These intersecting demands create a multi-dimensional permission model that needs to be adaptable, transparent, and enforceable at scale.

We have so many different personas—agencies, legal, IT, freelancers—interacting with the same creative assets, but with very different access needs. Authorization powered by Oso is the control plane that makes that complexity manageable.

- Peadar Coyle, CTO & Co-founder, AudioStack

This complexity is only heightened by the rise of generative AI. Brand safety concerns are driving more rigorous due diligence from customers, especially around data provenance, IP access, and GDPR compliance. 

Your Code Will Evolve—But Your Authorization Often Won’t

Like many startups, AudioStack initially rolled its own authorization layer. But as the platform evolved and customer demands grew more complex, the limitations of that homegrown approach quickly surfaced.

The biggest issue? Fragility. When the original developer behind the system left, the institutional knowledge went with them. What remained was brittle, under-documented code that few on the team felt confident modifying. Adding new features often meant updating multiple microservices in ways that weren’t well coordinated or easily testable. 

Teams started to delay roadmap items simply because they didn’t want to deal with the authorization implications. As AudioStack expanded support for new customer roles—like external agencies with time-boxed access—each new requirement forced further refactoring of already fragile code. Peader estimated it would take two engineers between three to six months to make basic enhancements to the custom authorization system.

It didn’t grind our roadmap to a complete halt, but it added so much friction that everyone in the company recognized we had a problem.

- Peadar Coyle, CTO & Co-founder, AudioStack

The cost wasn’t just in development hours. The lack of visibility and auditability around permissions posed a compliance risk—especially with large enterprise customers increasingly asking for proof of controls aligned with GDPR, SOC 2, and IP protection standards.

The conclusion was clear: continuing to evolve authorization in-house wasn’t just inefficient—it was unsustainable. 

What Was Needed from an Authorization Partner

When it became clear that building and maintaining authorization in-house was no longer viable, Peadar and his team turned their attention to finding a purpose-built solution. But they weren’t just looking for a tool—they were looking for a partner they could trust over the long term. They had five key requirements:

1. Credibility at scale. AudioStack wanted to see proof that the solution worked in production for companies of similar complexity. The breadth of Oso case studies stood out.  As Peadar says “It was a major decision. We needed to know this solution would still be around—and still be great—five years from now.” 
2. Robust documentation and developer experience. With a team working across multiple services and stacks, ease of integration and clear, well-maintained docs were non-negotiable. Oso stood out for the quality of its SDKs, documentation, and support ecosystem, all of which would speed adoption of the new technology while reducing risk.
3. Confidence in the company itself. Peadar looked at the financial backing behind each vendor, spoke with their teams during the RFP process, and tapped into engineering communities to see what real users were saying.
4. Flexibility. AudioStack knew its RBAC model would need to evolve as new customer roles and compliance requirements emerged. Any solution that couldn’t support that evolution was a non-starter.
5. Excellence in managed services. To keep pace with AudioStack’s growth, Peader recognized the need to outsource some of the company’s infrastructure. Here, the team prioritized security and robustness of the service, along with high product roadmap velocity—delivering continuous improvements and new features that AudioStack could harness to further improve its offerings. 

There were open source tools that looked interesting, but they felt like science projects. We wanted the full product—backed by a team that knew what enterprise customers need. Only Oso met all of these requirements—not just as a product fit, but as a long-term infrastructure decision we could build on with confidence.

- Peadar Coyle, CTO & Co-founder, AudioStack

Enterprise-Grade Authorization Without the Overhead. The Impact of Oso

After taking the decision to adopt Oso in 2023, AudioStack has transformed how it handles authorization—turning a source of friction into a foundation for scalability, speed, and customer trust. What was once brittle and fragmented is now flexible, auditable, and easy to extend.

Key benefits include:

• 2x faster feature delivery: With authorization logic centralized and version-controlled, engineers no longer dread permission-related changes. New roles and workflows can be added without blocking releases.
  
• Auditability and trust: Oso provides dashboards and logs that make it easy to demonstrate who has access to what—critical for GDPR, SOC 2, and brand safety requirements. Oso’s tools for testing and debugging are key to validating authorization controls are scoped to meet the access needs of the platform.
  
• Support for complex, evolving permissions: From time-boxed freelancer access to multi-role enterprise hierarchies across admins and producers, Polar—Oso’s declarative policy language— handles AudioStack’s multi-dimensional access needs without brittle custom code.
  
• Reduced engineering distraction: By offloading authorization to a trusted solution, the team can focus on higher-value work—like building AI-driven product features and enhancing customer experience.

Within weeks Oso gave us auditability and flexible permissions, so we could focus on things that actually win us business.

- Peadar Coyle, CTO & Co-founder, AudioStack

AudioStack has deployed its authorization layer to Oso Cloud, using it to support its suite of microservices running on AWS. AudioStack also implemented the Oso-provided fallback node, providing continued authorization checks even if connectivity to Oso Cloud is temporarily disrupted. The company’s deployment runs across multiple AWS regions to further enhance redundancy and resilience.

Future-Proofing AI Workflows with Oso

As AudioStack continues to push the boundaries of generative audio, authorization is set to play an even more central role—particularly in securing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and agentic workflows, protecting proprietary data used in AI models with LLM access controls.

For AudioStack, which works with some of the most valuable brands in media and advertising, this is non-negotiable.

When you're working with AI-generated content, authorization becomes foundational—it’s how we give customers confidence their IP is protected, no matter how many people are involved in the workflow.

- Peadar Coyle, CTO & Co-founder, AudioStack

With growing customer scrutiny around brand safety, GDPR, and IP protection, Peadar sees Oso as essential infrastructure in evolving AI pipelines—especially as enterprise buyers demand proof of control, not just claims of security.

Working at the frontier of AI audio, the company is growing fast, and has open positions across the organization-from engineering to sales and commercial roles. 

Key Lessons for Engineering Leaders

You won’t win any prizes for having the best permission model. Your customers just expect it to work—and with Oso it does, without slowing you down.

- Peadar Coyle, CTO & Co-founder, AudioStack

From his experience building, maintaining, and ultimately replacing a homegrown authorization system, Peadar offers these takeaways:

• Treat authorization as infrastructure, not an afterthought: It touches every part of the product and becomes mission-critical as you scale—plan accordingly.
  
• Don’t build it yourself: Even if it seems simple at first, in-house solutions become brittle, hard to maintain, and a drag on roadmap velocity.
  
• Look for a whole product, not just code: Support, documentation, SDKs, and roadmap visibility all matter. You’re not just adopting a tool—you’re betting on a partner.
  
• Plan for change: Your permission model will evolve as customer needs shift. Choose a solution that supports flexibility, not rigid models
  
• Prioritize long-term viability: Authorization is almost a one-way-door decision. Migrations down the road will be immensely disruptive. Pick a provider that will still be around—and still be investing in the product—years from now.
  

Applying Key Learnings

AudioStack’s experience shows that delegating authorization to a focused platform can unlock innovation time, satisfy auditors and keep AI data safe. 

 If you are debating whether it's time to assess your authorization roadmap, ask yourself:

• Do engineers avoid touching your permission layer?
• Could faster authorization changes accelerate your roadmap?
• Do you have concerns about responding to a customer’s next regulatory compliance  audit?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, it's time to talk to Oso. Book a meeting with an Oso engineer.