The headache of large-scale configurations
With cyber threats on the rise, maintaining operational and security conditions is proving to be a major challenge for companies. According to a report from French government platform for cybersecurity: cybermalveillance.gouv, a third of cyberattacks succeed because of poor system hardening. Companies struggle to keep enforcing their security policies, not least because of the array of challenges that operational security teams have to contend with:
- Complex infrastructure: Multi-OS, hybrid (on-premises and cloud) infrastructure is spread across several providers and needs to comply with the security standards specific to each OS.
- Configuration drift: Discrepancies naturally arise over time between the intended and the actual state of systems. These gaps are becoming even more common as DevOps steps up in terms of speed and scale of baseline provisioning. Tools that are central to DevOps like Terraform or Ansible do not ensure continuous enforcement of the desired system state over time.
- Regulatory compliance: You need to fulfil your obligations when it comes to standards such as GDPR, ISO 27001, and NIS, which requires traceability and configuration audits. Manual management may be carried out with the best of intentions, but can lead to errors, result in non-compliance, and ultimately create legal risks.
- High volume of work: Manual configuration is time-consuming, repetitive, and doesn’t deliver much value. As your infrastructure grows and security requirements along with it, the number of tasks on your list can quickly become overwhelming.
There is a solution to all of this: you need to standardize and automate your configuration management. But how do you do it?
→ How to automate, standardize, and secure your configuration management
What is Policy as Code (PaC)?
Policy as Code is about defining and managing configuration and security policies in code form, rather than through manual processes or static documents.
It is part of the DevOps approach and is founded on several key principles:
Standardize security policies
Bringing all your configurations into a single source of truth ensures they are applied uniformly across all systems. Multi-OS compatible solutions offering a single standard for several OSs simplify things for your teams, who no longer have to adapt configurations for each environment.
Automate to reduce errors and save time
Automation reduces errors and frees ops teams from repetitive work, allowing them to focus on high-value tasks. Less time spent correcting drifts or auditing manually means more productive teams and optimized resources, significantly reducing your operational costs.
Scale up – managing thousands of nodes from a single console
With Policy as Code, you can manage thousands of nodes from one central console, deploying security policies instantly and consistently. Some solutions even offer a consolidated view of your fleet. By combining automation and systematic configuration monitoring, you get continuous feedback on the state of your machines. To optimize performance, an agent-based architecture minimizes resource consumption and supports scalability.
Audit and remediate – with a flexible solution
- In audit mode to evaluate the state of a machine without intervention
- In remediation mode to automatically correct deviations and drift in configurations.
Simplify audits – for better compliance visibility
Policy as Code makes life easier when it comes to certification audits (PCI DSS, ISO 27001, CIS, etc.), providing full traceability and real-time visibility. This is a huge asset for organizations that have to navigate strict regulatory constraints.
Policy as Code: a reliable foundation for security and peace of mind
Policy as Code takes security policy management and transforms it into an automated, scalable, and reliable process. Standardization, flexibility, and cost reduction make it an essential asset for modern organizations, especially those in complex and regulated environments. It’s an approach that delivers the high performance and strict compliance you need to give you peace of mind.
