IAC Compliance

IAC Compliance
In the past, IT professionals would have to carefully manage on-premise servers. These sensitive
machines would have to be kept in cool, dark places and only a couple of people would even
know how to manage critical systems. All that has changed dramatically over the past 10 years.
Now, cloud providers are able to manage vital infrastructure from their own warehouses. There
is no need for businesses to make physical changes or be in the server room, which has given rise
to the DevOps field and allowed for a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD)
pipeline for Infrastructure as Code in the cloud. At the same time, these rapid developments have
presented new security challenges that demand better Infrastructure as Code compliance
practices. Keep reading to learn more about IaC and how companies can ensure security and
compliance without slowing development.
The Importance of Securit y and Developer Collaboration
One of the biggest challenges of IaC and CI/CD is that developers and security experts can
sometimes find themselves at odds. While developers are pushing innovation, they may not be
taking security into consideration as they build new infrastructures. It is difficult to wear both
hats, which is why it is important for developers and security professionals to collaborate and
mitigate risks before investing the time and effort in building an infrastructure and pushing the
systems into the production.
Ideally, the developer will choose the tools through which they want to receive feedback from
the security team. By using familiar tools, they won’t have to learn new programs or change their
behavior. This helps maintain maximum productivity while also ensuring that IaC is not creating
unnecessary security or compliance risks.
The Advantages of IaC
When developers and security experts are on the same page, Infrastructure as Code compliance
can actually be preventative. Instead of having to react to security issues once the infrastructure
is already being run, developers can actively integrate controls into the CI / CD pipeline to
ensure that the infrastructure is safe and secure from day one. The easiest way (and not the best
one!) to achieve is to have the security team create IaC templates for developers, but there are
even more advanced ways to integrate preventative measures.
Test ing IaC Compliance
Developers already use a variety of security compliance testing throughout the CI/CD process.
Moving forward, businesses will need to implement even more cloud security tools in order to
achieve an accurate view of security risks. This includes the compliance tests for Infrastructure
as Code, which looks at code in isolation and identifies any compliance issues in the IaC
template. It will also require advanced IaC analysis in order to go beyond the template and make
sure there aren’t any compliance violations before the provisioning job reaches the cloud.
Aligning compliance, DevOps and security is key to reducing security risks, allowing for better
developer productivity and strengthening compliance.
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