As the rate of cloud use continues to rise, organizations find it more difficult to manage a consistent security posture across their highly dynamic and dispersed environments. The traditional security methodologies (which rely on the majority of their processes on manual audits and static configuration settings) have long since lost their relevance in managing the security of new Cloud Infrastructure which constantly change due to rapid automation and deployment.
To solve this conundrum, organizations are turning to Policy-as-Code (PaC) as an innovative way to define, manage, and enforce both compliance and security policies through code. By providing organizations with a way to automate cloud security enforcement, PaC reduces human error and ensures consistent governance throughout the enterprise.
What is Policy-as-Code?
When talking about Policy-as-Code, one is discussing the practice of defining a security/compliance/operational policy in a format that can be executed (validated/enforced) throughout the infrastructure lifecycle via a machine-readable code format.
Instead of using a manual process or a separate document to manage their policies, organizations now include those policies as part of their development and deployment processes. As a result, organizations can automatically verify whether cloud resources comply with established security standards before they enter production. By treating their policies as software code, these organizations can enjoy benefits such as version control, auditability, automation, and scalability.
Why Traditional Security Models Fall Short
Cloud environments are very dynamic; infrastructure can be continually provisioned, modified and scaled throughout the entire lifecycle (from Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), to containers, to complete CI/CD pipelines). There are many challenges with attempting manual security reviews to keep pace with cloud deployments' speed.
Cloud breaches caused by misconfigured cloud storage, overly permissive access controls and insecure API's continue to be among the leading causes of cloud breaches. These are often due to late security checks extremely late in their deployment lifecycle or relying on inconsistent manual validation processes.
Policy-as-Code solves this problem by moving security enforcement earlier in the development lifecycle so organizations can detect and prevent violations prior to deploying resources.
How Policy-as-Code Improves Cloud Security
Policy-as-Code allows organizations to automate the enforcement of security standards across cloud platforms, applications & infrastructure components.
Security teams can define rules to automatically validate configurations related to Identity & Access Management (IAM), Encryption, Network Segmentation, Logging, Compliance Requirements and Resource Provisioning. If a deployment violates a rule, the system can automatically block the deployment or alert immediately.
Using Policy-as-Code reduces the risk of insecure configurations entering production environments and increases consistency to all teams and across all platforms within the cloud environment.
Advantages of Policy-as-Code
There are many advantages to Policy-as-Code (PaC), and one of the primary advantages is that it provides consistency in applying your cloud/hybrid policies because they are applied uniformly, which reduces configuration drift and human error. By having policies applied consistently, there are fewer chances of drift because of manual intervention.
With automation comes increased operational efficiency when it comes to applying policies, removing the need for manual validation of the same policy multiple times and speeding up the security review process across all phases of the CI/CD pipeline. This means that developers can quickly deploy new solutions while still being compliant with the organization's security policies and guidelines.
Because PaC utilizes policies as code, the ability to audit and enforce governance has increased as well. Organizations can track the versions of policies when they are changed and have access to the history of policies in order to demonstrate compliance during audit.
The use of PaC allows for easier management of security controls over large and complex cloud infrastructures with very little to no increase in operational costs.
Typical Use Cases for PaC in Cloud Security
There are a number of typical use cases for using PaC for cloud security, such as enforcing encryption standards, preventing public access to cloud objects, validating the configuration of network devices, and limiting the permissions granted to identity management systems.
Organizations also use PaC to ensure compliance with various regulatory frameworks, enable proper logging, validate security configurations for Kubernetes environments, as well as to check Infrastructure-as-Code templates for insecure configurations prior to deploying to production.
As cloud environments continue to expand, Policy-as-Code is becoming an increasingly critical part of maintaining secure operations at scale and in compliance.
Integration of Policy-as-Code with DevSecOps
Policy-as-Code integration within DevSecOps provides many valuable advantages over the lifecycle of an application (from initial creation until complete deployment) by performing continuous validation checks against defined security policies via CI/CD Tools, ensuring uniform validation against a defined security policy The integration of Policy-as-Code allows for earlier identification and resolution of issues, which will save organizations money on remediating errors or oversights; will result in less downtime due to missed deployment timelines; and will improve collaboration between Development and Operation teams and Security teams by providing each team with greater visibility into the shared expectations and enforcement of compliance to security standards.
Via automated CI/CD processes, organizations can now shift from a reactive approach to addressing evolving security threats to a proactive approach for governing security best practices.
Challenges Organizations Need to Overcome
While there are many advantages to using Policy as Code, organizations must plan and coordinate properly for a successful implementation. Poorly defined Policies can yield too many false positives or inhibit development workflows.
Organizations should have Policies that are clear, usable and aligned to the organization's goals. To ensure ongoing success without interfering with innovation, there should be ongoing tuning, monitoring and collaboration of Policies among all teams.
In addition, organizations should also invest in developing visibility and reporting capabilities which support identification and resolution of Policy violations in an efficient manner.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, with the ever-increasing complexity of cloud infrastructures and increasing speed of deployment, organizations require security approaches that are automated, scalable and consistent. By using Policy-as-Code, organizations can proactively enforce cloud security standards, while also providing the agility required by the modern development environment.
Incorporating security policies within the infrastructure and deployment workflow will help organizations to reduce risk, improve compliance and create more resilient cloud infrastructures, while not compromising innovation.
How Ancrew Global Helps
Supports businesses improve their overall cloud security by providing Policy-as-Code implementation, cloud security governance, DevSecOps integration, compliance automation, and security monitoring services. With these solutions you can automate your policy enforcement processes, minimize configuration errors, get enhanced visibility, and apply the same security standards to all changes made in the cloud.