Improve your cloud security with policy-as-a-code

Enter policy-as-a-code

The objective of policies is to protect the cloud infrastructure by controlling access, managing infrastructure operations, setting limits, and reducing the blast radius of incidents.

Policy-as-a-Code employs code writing in a high-level language to automate and manage policies easily.

Policy-as-a-Code becomes relevant since automation in the cloud and DevOps narrative is only increasing. It also becomes paramount today as software products and services have to be tested heavily and comprehensively to verify their health, readiness, performance, and accuracy. It is only with these guarantees that enterprises can release products/services confidently into the market.

By enabling Policy-as-a-Code, enterprises can drive automated decision-making while allowing developers and engineers to manage features-driven work without sacrificing compliance.

The high-level language employed in Policy-as-a-Code is dependent on the policy engine, which takes a query input, adds data, and a policy to provide a query result. These policies can be expressed in declarative languages and can be used for authorization control, infrastructure provisioning in the cloud, and Kubernetes control.

How does policy-as-a-code improve cloud security?

The enterprise benefits of Policy-as-a-Code are significant for saving costs and improving the cloud security posture.

Here are a few ways in which Policy-as-a-Code improves cloud security:

Improve access management

Policy-as-a-Code is a great way to drive access management and authorization. It helps enterprises draw up policies that prevent inadvertent access to crucial and confidential resources such as databases and storage, workflows, etc. Policy-as-a-Code helps in implementing fine-grained access control for an application by establishing policies to check authorization.

It becomes especially important in the DevOps narrative – While leaving services open to the internet might not be a problem in production, it can mean being open to vulnerabilities during development and testing. Testing environments could be less secure than production environments, and developer instances can remain inadvertently available even post-development.

However, by leveraging Policy-as-a-Code, enterprises can control ingress and egress to and from resources, and mitigate the likelihood of unauthorized access to resources or even data breaches. Essentially, Policy-as-a-Code enforces the security best practices regardless of the type of environment, whether it’s development, testing, production, or securing the software supply chain.

Drive compliance and security

The compliance and regulatory landscape are becoming increasingly stringent in the wake of rising security concerns and with sensitive data now residing in the cloud. Enterprises have to make sure that their cloud security is optimized and that all enterprise policies regarding the same for compliance and regulatory requirements fit in seamlessly with the organization’s needs.

Policy-as-a-Code makes it possible to have custom policies written in OPA (Open Policy Agent), identify cloud resources that violate enterprise policies, proactively mitigate them to ensure compliance, and fine-tune enterprise policies so that they can improve the cloud security posture.

Easier and improved validation before/during deployment

Policy-as-a-Code also helps organizations create a pipeline that validates application, infrastructure, and deployment processes. In the DevOps world, this can be an important consideration owing to the CI/CD process.

Using Policy-as-a-Code, enterprises can validate the resource graph before and also during deployment. Out-of-compliance resources can then be easily identified and blocked from being modified or created by a policy. Policy-as-a-Code also validates the infrastructure before deploying resources making security more airtight.

Sandboxing

As the number of automated systems increases, it becomes essential to protect these automated systems and ensure that they do not perform any dangerous actions. Given the rising volumes of automation, Policy-as-a-Code can serve as a guardrail for these automated systems. Manual verification for these becomes a time-consuming and error-prone process. By employing Policy-as-a-Code, enterprise policies can easily keep up with automated systems and ensure their safekeeping.

Creating the right checks in place is an important and major part of keeping the cloud environment secure. Setting the right checks is also essential to the software delivery process in the wake of cloud application development and the rise of development methodologies like DevOps that employ a lot of automation and harness the power of the cloud to collaborate. To improve cloud security, it thus becomes essential to catch errors or noncompliance faster and earlier in the life cycle. Further, Policy-as-a-Code benefits developers and operators directly by enabling repeatability, versioning, and testing and can bring the best-of-breed security and granular control to the cloud.

This article is first published here –

https://www.cxotoday.com/corner-office/improve-your-cloud-security-with-policy-as-a-code/

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