The present disclosure addresses an enhancement to a resource access decision facility, preferably a CORBA RAD, that allows additional query capabilities and faster resource access. Resource access decisions obtained from RAD are placed in a cache. An application can retrieve access decisions directly from the cache rather than requesting the decisions from RAD. If an access decision is not available in the cache, the access decision is requested from RAD. The preferred embodiments of the present disclosure allow the retrieval of lists of roles that have access to a particular resource and resources to which a particular role has access. The cache can be populated either prior to or during the mainstream execution of a program. In another embodiment, a backup version of the data in the cache can be stored in a storage medium external to the cache for near immediate restart after a crash or shutdown.