Infrastructure as code and your security team: 5 critical investment areas

The promises of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) are faster speed and more consistent deployments – two key benefits that increase productivity throughout the software development lifecycle.

Speed ​​is great, but only if security teams are able to keep up with the pace of modern development. Historically, outdated practices and processes have held back security, while innovation in software development has grown rapidly, creating an imbalance that needs to be leveled.

IaC isn’t just a boon to developers; IaC is a fundamental technology that enables security teams to leapfrog into maturity. Yet many security teams are still figuring out how to leverage this modern approach to cloud application development. As adoption of IaC continues to grow, security teams must keep pace with the rapid and frequent changes in cloud architectures; otherwise, IaC can be a risky business.

If your organization adopts IaC, here are five critical areas to invest in.

Building Design Patterns

Constantly putting out fires from one project to another has made it challenging for security teams to find the time and resources to prioritize building fundamental security design patterns for cloud and hybrid architectures.

Security design patterns are a required foundation for security teams to keep pace with modern developments. They help solution architects and developers accelerate independently, while having clear guardrails that define the best practices that security wants them to follow. Security teams also gain autonomy and can focus on strategic needs.

IaC offers new possibilities to build and codify these patterns. Creating templates is a common approach that many organizations invest in. For common technology applications, security teams set standards by building out IaC templates that meet organizational security requirements. By engaging project teams early to pre-identify security requirements, security teams help integrate security and compliance needs to give developers a better starting point to build their IaC.

Templates are not a panacea, however. It can add value to select commonly used cloud resources, but requires an investment in security automation to scale.

Security as code and automation

As your organization matures in using IaC, your cloud architectures become more complex and larger. Your developers can quickly adopt new cloud architectures and capabilities, and you’ll find that static IaC templates don’t scale to meet the dynamic needs of modern cloud-native applications.

Every application has different needs and every application development team will inevitably adapt the IaC template to the unique needs of that application. The capabilities of cloud service providers change daily, turning your IaC security template into a depreciation tool that quickly becomes stale. Security teams require a large investment in governance at scale, and your SMBs will have a lot of work to do to manage exceptions.

Automation that relies on security as code provides a solution and enables your security teams with limited resources to scale. In fact, it may be the only viable approach to address cloud-native security. It allows you to code your design patterns and dynamically apply security to suit your application’s use case.

Managing your security design pattern using security as code has several benefits:

• Security teams don’t have to become IaC experts.
• You get all the benefits of a version-driven, modular, and extensible way to build these design patterns.
• Security design patterns can evolve independently, allowing security teams to work autonomously.
• Security teams can use automation to get started early in the development process.

The ratio of developers to ops to security resources is sometimes something like 100:10:1. I recently spoke with an organization that has 10,000 developers and 3 AppSec engineers. The only viable way for a team like this to scale and prioritize their time efficiently is to rely on automation to force their security expertise.

Visibility and governance

Once you have reached sufficient maturity in your IaC adoption, you will want all changes to be made via code. This allows you to lock down other channels (i.e., cloud console, CLIs) for change and build on good software development governance processes to ensure every code change is reviewed.

Security automation seamlessly integrated into your development pipeline can now assess every change to your cloud-native apps and provide insight into any inherent risks, avoiding time-consuming manual assessments. This allows you to build mature management processes that ensure security vulnerabilities are addressed and compliance requirements are met.

Drift Detection

On your journey to IaC maturity, changes are made to your cloud environment through IaC, as well as traditional channels such as the CSP console or command-line tools. When developers make direct changes to deployed environments, you lose visibility and can lead to significant risks. In addition, your IaC will no longer represent your source of truth, so assessing your IaC may give you an incomplete picture.

Investing in drift detection capabilities that validate your deployed environments against your IaC can ensure that any drift is immediately detected and addressed by pushing a code change to your IaC.

Developers and Security Champions

Security teams should emphasize the developer’s workflow and experience and strive to continuously reduce the friction to implement security. Having developer security champions who understand the challenges developers face can ensure that security automation meets the needs of the developer. Likewise, security champions within development teams can help generate security awareness and create a positive feedback loop to help improve design patterns.

it comes down to

IaC can be a risky business, but it doesn’t have to be. Faster speed and more consistent deployments are in sight, as long as you can invest in the right places. By being strategic, deliberate and investing in the necessary areas, your organization’s security team is best positioned to keep up with the rapid and frequent changes during IaC adoption.

Are you ready to take advantage of what IaC has to offer? There is no better time than now.

Aakash Shah is CTO and Co-Founder of oak9