Automating Security and Compliance with Policy-as-code

In modern application development, both DevOps and automation play key roles in accelerating time to market. In fact, it's essential to ensure seamless resource provisioning, security, and compliance in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

However, using a manual handbook-based policy management approach doesn't always scale. More often than not, they are also not applied in a non-uniform manner. The good news is that policy-as-code helps address this problem effectively. 

Policy-as-code not only provides enhanced visibility but also enforces them automatically. This approach forces organizations to take a good look at their policies and transform them into code. 

Whenever companies do this, policies drive decisions in the same manner always. For example, you can enforce them programmatically through code if regulatory compliance protocols (such as CIS  or PCI DSS) govern your business.

However, while it may seem straightforward, getting developers to embrace security early in the process continues to be a challenge. But it pays to adopt a security culture as it better equips you to defend against potential attacks. 

What's more, security will also be a component that helps market the product and drive sales. After all, no one wants to install an application that doesn't boast robust security protocols.

We survey the entire landscape of automation from a cloud-native perspective and offer an adoption path for your organization in the following whitepaper.

What is Policy-as-Code?

Policy-as-code helps companies automate the implementation of security, compliance, governance protocols, and best practices. It's important as manual (handbook-based) policy management is far from adequate. 

Given the complexity and scale of cloud environments, they aren't usually deployed in a uniform manner and fail to scale well. Every change to the infrastructure can also quickly turn into a nightmare to manually apply or validate compliance and security policies. 

When you codify policies and programmatically enforce them automatically, it makes this whole process much more manageable. The result is a highly secure ecosystem to run your cloud-native applications.

For example, when you specify policies within the code, it immediately prohibits potential violations. As these can be applied continuously during the development cycle, you can build a secure application on a robust foundation.

Embracing policy-as-code goes hand in hand with adopting many DevOps practices, for example, maintaining controls in a central repository, enabling automatic validation in the pipeline, applying version control, and continuous monitoring.

In this scenario, you can get started with policy-as-code by simply building it yourself using open source tools or by using a policy enforcement platform like Magalix.

Why Design a Secure System Using Threat Modeling?

The best way to mitigate risk and reduce potential vulnerabilities is to leverage a threat modeling approach. This technique uses extensive knowledge, intelligence, and experience to identify potential weaknesses and credible risks.

Whenever DevOps teams use threat modeling, they can devise control and countermeasures to respond to potential threats effectively. The primary objective is to eliminate the threat. Whenever that isn't possible, we should at least reduce the risk to an acceptable (or manageable) level.

Threat modeling targets both human error during the development process and external threats such as malware and hackers. You can significantly reduce such risks by integrating security as code within automated CI/CD pipelines.

Threat modeling is important because it assesses risks from the attacker's point of view.  It can go a long way in reducing product vulnerabilities and related remediation protocols. In that sense, threat modeling applies to both the development environment and cloud-native applications.

Threat actors strive to compromise development systems to inject vulnerabilities into the product code. This approach allows them to gain an entry point in the supply chain to then target the customer further down the chain. 

As Kubernetes is the go-to container orchestration system for cloud-based development, it's now an attractive target for threat actors. When it comes to Kubernetes, the primary cause of vulnerabilities is misconfigurations. Whenever hackers find misconfigurations, they have an opportunity to find and exploit weaknesses before they are patched. 

Figure: Integrating Threat Modeling into DevSecOps 

That's why it's critical to enforce policy-as-code right from the beginning. 

Why is Programmatic Policy Enforcement Important?

To deploy policy-as-code, you must first build a general-purpose policy architecture. Then you can leverage a policy agent, develop your own, or take advantage of a policy enforcement platform like Magalix.

Policy enforcement ties everything together. Organizations can efficiently support business ethics, compliance, safety, and security policy enforcement by enforcing policies through code. 

Policy-as-Code Helps Build a Security Culture

Enforcing policy-as-code also goes hand in hand with DevOps culture. By integrating security into your organizational culture, you can do more than just use a DevOps checklist. However, to achieve a strong security culture, you might have to go back to the drawing board and rewrite your procedures.

In this scenario, avoid adding a security expert to your DevOps team and expect them to add controls during the active development cycle. Instead, train the whole team to prioritize security and make it their responsibility to design and develop secure applications.

DevOps teams enjoy more flexibility when enforcing security and compliance policies through code. For example, they can apply rules and policies across related applications without having to do it manually, one by one.

Policy-as-Code Drives Developer-Centric Experiences

Whenever you integrate policy-as-code within DevOps workflows, you build developer-centric experiences with continuous deployment for cloud-native applications. You can also unleash "automated operators" within the Kubernetes cluster or cloud infrastructure to continuously monitor repositories for potential changes. 

Whenever it discovers a change, an update is automatically triggered. This approach drives exceptional governance levels within all clusters from a single source of truth. It also goes a long way in normalizing hybrid environments. 

When you enforce policies across the organization, you can enforce governance standards across all Kubernetes clusters with a single click. You can also implement enterprise policy checks for cloud environments with rules that fit the organization's specific requirements. This approach also helps us validate infrastructure compliance earlier in the SDLC and improve the overall robustness of your infrastructure.

When you create a centralized playbook that is enacted and enforced across the whole SDLC, your DevOps teams can innovate faster without compromising security. Your playbook can also include IT standards, industry regulatory policies, benchmarks, and custom rules that are enforced across the organization.

The key benefits of adopting this method are the early identification and elimination of potential vulnerabilities. This approach goes a long way in building robust and high-quality applications that you don't have to patch later. 

The Magalix Difference

At Magalix (now part of Weaveworks, the GitOps company), we equip DevOps teams with the tools they need to enforce security standards with policy-as-code programmatically. Whenever enterprises integrate PaC within their DevOps workflows, they improve developer-centric experiences while enabling and accelerating continuous deployment for cloud-native applications.

All it takes is a simple click to enforce security policies across the organization and apply governance standards and protocols across all Kubernetes clusters. We also deploy policy checks across enterprise cloud environments with rules that match your company's specific requirements.

As such, businesses that leverage the Magalix policy enforcement platform benefit from the automatic enforcement of security standards, lower risks, and faster time to market.

Developers can also innovate faster without compromising security or compliance with proper GitOps workflows and playbooks in cloud-native environments. They can also customize code to your organizational policies and automatically enforce them. This is what we call Trusted Application Delivery. 

If you’d like to reap the benefits of Trusted Application Delivery with Magalix and Weaveworks, check out Weave GitOps Enterprise or Request a demo.