Embodiments are directed to managing communication. Credentials of a user may be provided to an authorization service such that the authorization service authenticates the user as a member of authorization groups and such that the user may be associated with a gateway on an overlay network. The authorization groups may be compared with user groups to associate the user with one or more user group. The gateway may be associated with one or more resource group based on the user groups. Policy information may be generated for the gateway based on each resource group. The policy information may be provided to the gateway to define policies associated with resources in the overlay network. The policy information may be enforced against source nodes providing overlay traffic directed to target nodes in the overlay network.