Security Compliance

Prancer Enterprise is announcing that its entire cloud compliance policies repository is now open source. The repository is available on GitHub at

https://github.com/prancer-io/prancer-compliance-test

This move reflects Prancer’s commitment to open source technology and harness the power of community collaboration to move great ideas through the pipeline faster.

These compliance policies that focused on IaC Security and live cloud resources are based on CIS, NIST 800, PCI, HIPPA, HITRUST, CSA CCM and ISO 27001 compliance standards. These policies are all in REGO Open Policy Agent (OPA) language.

Prancer Enterprise platform helps companies achieve end-to-end security in the cloud by shifting security to the left and apply it early in the development process. Cloud DevOps engineers could have an early feedback on the security of the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates with every commit they are making to the code.

Prancer Enterprise Cloud Compliance repository has more than 1000 policies both on the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security and post-deployment resources. This unique Cloud compliance policy repository is the most significant contribution to the open-source community based on the de facto Rego policy language.

IaC Security policies cover Azure, AWS and Google Clouds. Kubernetes Objects are also supported in the IaC Security. Post-deployment security scans based on these cloud providers help businesses to increase cloud security posture and maintaining security in the cloud.

As more companies begin to rely on cloud technologies, they are also looking for ways to apply compliance to their cloud environment easily and make it a secure place for their workloads. Prancer Platform helps companies to leverage security throughout the lifecycle of their cloud deployment. Prancer Platform integrates into DevOps pipelines and provides IaC Security scan.

About Prancer

Prancer Enterprise (https://www.prancer.io/) provides a pre-deployment and post-deployment multi-cloud security platform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and live cloud environments. It shifts the security to the left and provides end-to-end security scanning based on the Policy as Code concept. DevOps engineers can use it for static code analysis on IaC to find security drifts and maintain their cloud security posture with continuous compliance features.

Continuous Compliance

Continuous compliance is tied in with building up a culture and procedure inside your association that ceaselessly surveys your consistent position to guarantee you meet your industry and administrative requests while keeping up secure frameworks.

Why does every Organization need Continuous Compliance?

ControlCase gathers and screens important information takes care of from client IT foundation like SIEM, Vulnerability Scanners, Data disclosure, Identity, and access the board, and so forth ControlCase Continuous Compliance Solution utilizes creative and profoundly successful information examination innovation and furnishes you with significant experiences dependent on holes, dangers, and resources in scope. ControlCase gives a brought together dashboard to Continuous Compliance utilizing leader online comfort called SkyCAM, which offers a moment look to consistency and rebelliousness status. This is critical for associations that need to rapidly accomplish consistency across their IT, for example, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, SOC2 consistency/guidelines. Continuous compliance helps CISOs, CSOs, Chief Compliance Officers, and different partners guarantee administrative consistency inside their associations.

Continuous Compliance & Assurance ought to ease these problem areas by expanding inner straightforwardness and control while at the same time diminishing everyday obligations and overhead.

Building Continuous Compliance into DevOps

Constant affirmation gives genuine feelings of serenity that the condition of consistency is continuous as opposed to simply a lapsed preview. By executing continuous compliance and assurance, associations can have confidence that their data resources are secured consistently.

Continuous Compliance Monitoring has a compliance-driven DevOps culture that helps decrease operational expenses, improve efficiencies, and diminish hazards impressively. Consistence-related exercises should be remembered ahead of schedule for the product lifecycle by the DevOps groups a similar path as in the testing method. How everybody is looking at moving left for testing the equivalent applies to compliances. Robotization will help in this somewhat. You can't leave the security and consistency-related worries for later stages in the delivery cycle.

Which three practices support Continuous Compliance?

• Constant checking is the interaction and innovation used to distinguish consistency and hazard issues related to an association's economic and operational security.
• The economic and operational security comprises individuals, cycles, and frameworks cooperating to help productive and viable activities. Controls are set up to address hazards inside these segments.
• By consistently observing the activities and controls, powerless or ineffectively planned or executed rules can be revised or supplanted – subsequently improving the association's operational danger profile.

Financial backers, governments, the general population, and different partners keep on expanding their requests for more effective corporate administration and business straightforwardness.

 

IAC Evolutions

Historically, in the software development life cycle (SDLC), once code was written, it had to be manually deployed to physical servers. As you can imagine, this process was both time consuming and fraught with complications. Oftentimes, a single script was used to establish dependency libraries, setup load balancers and complete other necessary tasks. Also preparing the server to host the code was a daunting task. As a result, only a few people would be capable of understanding all the moving parts and be able to make changes, launch updates and problem solve. A server could be down for hours while a single operations engineer tried to sort through all the different variables to find the source of the problem.

The SDLC Waterfall Approach

Beginning in the 1990s, software development experts tried to improve the SDLC process by relying on a waterfall approach. With this strategy, developers, QA engineers and system administrators each had a specific role to play in the development process. If a problem arose with the code, the admin would have to assign the task to the developers. The fix would then have to be tested by the QA team before finally being sent back to the system admin for deployment.

At that time, the Software Development Life cycle (SDLC) was focused on the application layer code. Preparing the servers and deploying the applications to the server was another skill. This added another separate area of expertise that also had the potential to introduce bottlenecks.

In theory, this approach provided logical steps for troubleshooting. However, development doesn’t occur in a linear pattern and it didn’t take long for new releases to throw significant wrenches in the process. In addition, it was all too easy for different teams to blame problems on each other, further complicating communication and collaboration. Now add security concerns to the mix and you have a truly inefficient and static software development approach.

By the early 2000s, companies had developed a more agile approach to software development. They recognized the importance of employees with cross functionalities and collaboration among teams. However, it still wasn’t a perfect system and it was easy for projects to be delayed if communication fell apart. Clearly, there was still significant room for improvement.

Cloud Computing

The introduction of cloud computing with the emergence of Amazon Web Services and the beta version of the Google App Engine significantly changed the software development life cycle. Cloud computing allowed users to experience on demand tools and resources that didn’t have to be actively managed or stored on site. Virtualization also paved the way for further automation. Suddenly, more users were able to take full advantage of technologies without having to rely on an expert or become one themselves. This new level of accessibility allowed for collaboration and innovation.

When cloud providers became more mature and provided API access to their backend services, companies also started releasing infrastructure as code tools. These helped to further support virtual machines and app services and move away from physical hardware that would have to be manually configured and maintained. This not only helped business cut costs, but also accelerated the software development life cycle while also working to eliminate errors and identify security vulnerabilities.

At the same time, it became clear that microservices were necessary in order to effectively organize software development. Essentially, this means that an application and its services are split into smaller components that can then be deployed independently. Instead of bundling services, microservices provide a more agile approach that can better handle many different moving parts. This new mode of organization and deployment also required a full stack team approach where the task boundaries are more fluid and team members can contribute along the entire SDLC pipeline. A full stack team is able to work to avoid clogs in the pipeline that can result when different people are solely responsible for specific tasks.

Eventually, the idea of DevOps emerged as a new way to significantly accelerate efficiency while also prioritizing security. In this new model, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is not just about the application layer. With the advancement of cloud provider companies, infrastructure is part of the SDLC as part of one unified pipeline; both the infrastructure and application can be deployed to the cloud.

Collaboration is at the heart of DevOps. Instead of having each team tightly bound within a certain role, everyone is involved in all aspects of the DevOps process. System admins have the ability to write scripts, QA engineers can move beyond simply testing and so forth. This fosters better understanding among teams while increasing productivity.

DevOps also allows enterprises to move security to the forefront. It is no longer simply tacked onto the end of the process after loopholes have already been created and written into the software. Integrating security into DevOps also helps support the CI/CD pipeline. Enterprises don’t have to deal with the same bottlenecks that previously slowed innovation.

Static Code Analysis

Static code analysis is another key aspect that has contributed to the security of the DevOps model. In the past, developers would have to design and run a program before they could manually go through the debugging process. With static code analysis, code can be automatically checked against a set of rules during the creation process. This significantly accelerates the debugging process and catches problems early on when they are easier and less expensive to fix. Static code analysis is also able to provide a more in-depth look at the code and accurately pinpoint problems.

In addition, static code analysis allows security to “shift to the left.” Essentially, this means that security and compliance issues are addressed as early in the development process as possible. This translates into a better and more agile approach to security that is capable of identifying emerging threats, making automatic fixes and sending alerts when suspicious activity is detected.

Static code analysis for the application layer is here to stay and there are lots of vendors providing automated tools to conduct static code analysis on application layer codes. But since Infrastructure and Application are being deployed to the target cloud environment with one pipeline, it is crucial to have the static code analysis for the IaC pipeline as well. This ensures the infrastructure, which is being deployed to the cloud, will be secure and provide early feedback to the infrastructure developer concerning any potential security problems.

While static code analysis on IaC has proven to be an effective tool, it is still a new concept to many companies. Most businesses still rely on the Pull Request (PR) approval process to catch a security misconfiguration. However, this is prone to the errors and the unsecure infrastructure could be deployed to the cloud, which makes a huge risk for companies who are after zero touch deployments.

Prancer cloud validation framework is a pre-deployment validation engine that can conduct static code analysis on your IaC. It can easily be integrated to your current pipeline and toolset. Prancer supports native Azure ARM templates, Amazon AWS CloudFormation templates and Google Deployment templates. Prancer also supports Terraform for all major cloud providers for static code analysis.

IaC development teams leverage the power of git to contribute to the code. Usually the process is to create a feature branch out of the master branch, make the changes, check the code and raise the Pull Request. Prancer validation framework can be integrated to any CI tool to evaluate the code at this stage and make sure it is compliant. All the predefined policies are available in a centralized git repository. With just a few clicks you can make sure the malicious code does not find its way into your environment. You don’t need to have an active credential to the target environment to conduct the static code analysis on your IaC templates. For example, consider a scenario where an IaC developer is writing code for the production environment and they want to get early feedback on the code before starting the CI process. They can utilize the power of prancer validation framework to make sure the IaC is secure and solid before starting the deployment process.

As you can see, IaC has gone through tremendous changes in just the past few decades. Virtualization and automation are making the SDLC more agile and accessible to all parties involved while also making security a part of the development process and not just an afterthought. This has allowed companies to innovate at an unprecedented pace and makes the future of IaC and SDLC look brighter than ever.

To learn more about IaC, cloud computing and security and compliance, contact the experts at prancer.

Cloud Computing

Every cloud computing service relies on the same remote infrastructure for a conceptual framework. Servers located in the data center power this framework. As there are a lot of similarities between them, we can consider this computing system as a pyramid with three layers. Every layer has its own specialty. However, the basic infrastructure is the same. Lower layers of the cloud computing system are broader, representing their customizability, versatility, and have a wide application range. The upper layers have a specific purpose to follow, so they are narrower. Below, you will find three cloud computing types and their difference to understand all the layers individually:

1.    IaaS

This cloud computing system is the foundation of the pyramid. Infrastructure as a Service is very flexible and compressive among all other cloud services that are available. With this computing system, you receive a virtualized infrastructure of cloud computing you can manage and provision through the cloud provider endpoints. The IaaS provider manages and controls all the physical infrastructures such as data storage space, servers, etc. This way, the customer can customize their virtualized resources according to their requirements. With Infrastructure as a service, you can buy virtual machines and install, organize, and manage any software you want to use. This includes applications such as development tools, business analytics, applications, middleware, and operating systems. Furthermore, you only have to pay for the virtual machine you are using. This will facilitate you in scaling your computing requirements as you need without building any additional capacity. Examples of IaaS are GCE (Google Compute Engine), AWS (Amazon Web Services), EC2, and Microsoft Azure virtual machines.

2.    PaaS

This computing system comes above IaaS in the cloud computing pyramid. Not like IaaS, Platform as a Service more specialized. Instead of providing a virtual machine to you, you get a specific purpose resource in the cloud, which you can put your workload on / or automate your cloud process. In the IaaS model, the customer is responsible for OS-level patching and maintenance. But in the PaaS model, those layers are hidden from the customer, and they can just focus on specific use cases. Microsoft Azure App Services, Apache Stratos, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Google App Engine are examples of Platform as a Service.

3.    SaaS

Many people are familiar with this type of cloud computing. SaaS is located at the highest level of the pyramid. Software as a Service is a completely developed software solution that you can instantly use through the internet after purchasing the subscription. Software as a service is responsible for managing data, operating systems, infrastructure, and middleware that is really important for delivering the program and to make sure that wherever and whenever a customer needs access, they always find it available. There is numerous software as service applications that you can directly run on your web browsers without the need for downloading and installing the application. This way, companies can reduce their software management problems for IT teams, and the company can streamline and simplify their operations with multi-cloud and hybrid deployments. The examples of Software as a Service are Google Apps, Salesforce, Cisco WebEx, and Microsoft Office 365.

Conclusion

Cloud computing has changed how companies all over the world operate, something that most people are unable to realize yet. It is essential to understand the types of cloud computing and choose the right one for your business to grow. Cloud computing is increasingly growing, which is opening many new opportunities for businesses looking forward to driving the results of their business and innovating.

Lessons from the Twilio Breach

The Twilio breach is another reminder that no matter how advanced and automated IaC and cloud technology becomes, it is still fundamentally a human system and that means that mistakes can be made. In addition, it shows that businesses have to be more careful even when it comes to open-source collaboration. Some assets should be publicly accessible so that users can view and create files, but there needs to be authentication and access gateways for other assets. Ultimately, the company did the best they could in the situation. You can’t prevent attacks, but you can create systems that will quickly identify problems so that you can immediately respond. Twilio also received praise from industry experts for being transparent about the incident and how they responded. This helps others to learn and hopefully avoid similar situations.

Ultimately, IaC is a valuable tool that represents a major evolution in technology. However, it is not a perfect system. Misconfiguration continues to be a top security concern. If you need help improving IaC security and ensuring continuous compliance, contact prancer. We specialize in cloud validation frameworks that will help you make the most of IaC and cloud technology.

Immutable IaC and DevOps

The traditional mutable approach to infrastructure causes delays in the DevOps pipeline. Dependencies can make application deployments difficult and human innovation is actually slowed down by technology. Immutable IaC creates consistent environments that allow for automated testing and deployment that accelerates the DevOps process and eliminates delays and clogs in the pipeline.

With immutable IaC, teams don’t have to worry about manually validating changes. Everything can be handled through a continuous delivery pipeline that automates all the deployment and testing requirements. New applications can go online faster and all the usual risks associated with change can be eliminated.

Just because mutable infrastructures have been the standard doesn’t mean that they are the best solution. IT teams may be reluctant to let go of their manual update responsibilities, but automating tasks ultimately create more time and space for them to work on true innovations that can push the company forward.

If you have more questions about the benefits of immutable IaC and how you can implement this approach at your business, contact the experts at prancer. We specialize in cloud validation frameworks that support continuous compliance. We can provide you with advice, support and tools you need to take full advantage of cloud computing and IaC.

Cloud Security Guidelines

Every cloud security plan is going to look different based on your business and your industry. However, there are some general rules when it comes to best practices that will help provide guidance as your work towards establishing a flexible and scalable cloud security plan. In the third installment of our series, we will take a closer look at cloud security best practices and how you can use these to shape your security plan.

1.  Partner with a Trusted Cloud Provider

The very first step in establishing solid cloud security is to partner with a trusted and reputable cloud provider. As you shop around, look for providers who offer built-in security protocols that will support your efforts to secure data and meet compliance standards. The right provider will have earned a range of security compliance certifications that are publicly advertised for maximum transparency. In addition, you want a provider who can offer a marketplace of partners so that you can shop different solutions and integrate them into your deployment for a customized security plan.

2.  Understand Your Responsibilities

When you partner with a cloud provider, you are both responsible for certain aspects of security. It is important that you understand which tasks fall to which party. You don’t want to assume that the provider is taking care of a security protocol only to discover that it was your responsibility. A reputable cloud provider will provide a transparent shared responsibility model so that you have easy access to this information.

3.  Train All Users

When it comes to cloud computing, the users can either be an asset or a liability. Well-trained users will understand and implement security practices and avoid creating unnecessary vulnerabilities. By making users aware of the dangers of poor security practices and training them to spot abnormalities that could signal malware or phishing scams, you can turn them into a powerful security tool. If you work in an industry with complex compliance standards, it may be worth investing in having an employee complete industry-specific training and earn a certification. This will provide valuable in-house oversight.

4.  Create Secure Endpoints

Cloud technology has made it easier than ever for employees to work remotely and use mobile devices to access the cloud. Oftentimes, they are using personal devices, which means they won’t automatically have extra security that may come with company owned devices. In addition, in most cases, they are using a web browser to access documents. All of these endpoints must be secured. A reputable provider will offer protections that include: antivirus tools, firewalls, mobile device security features and other detection tools that can be used to identify any breaches.

5.  Ensure Visibility of Your Cloud

Using resources on the cloud can create a fast-paced environment. This can be further complicated by the fact that many companies use multiple cloud services. These factors can affect visibility and make it difficult to avoid creating blindspots. You will want a solution that allows for maximum visibility so that you can identify risks and maintain a clear vision of the entire system.

6.  Create a Password Policy

One of the easiest things you can do to support cloud security is to create a company-wide password policy. For example, require that users change their password every 90 days and prevent simple passwords by either generating unique passwords or requiring that they are 14 characters long and include a symbol, number and one uppercase letter. Multi-factor authentication can also help prevent unauthorized access. These types of policies can go a long way in preventing attacks.

7.  Encrypt All Your Data

Whether your data is being stored or in transit, it should always be encrypted. While a provider may offer encryption services, keep in mind that going this route means that they will have access to the encryption key. You can further increase security by using your own encryption solution. Even if a malicious party is able to access your data, they won’t be able to do anything with the information.

Any business can benefit from putting these cloud security best practices into place and working with a reputable provider who will work to support your security efforts. In the next part of our series, we will take a look at one final best practice: using a Cloud Access Security Broker. Many people aren’t familiar with this tool, so we will be using the next post to take a deep dive into this option and discuss what it is and how it can help.

If you have any additional questions about cloud security and compliance, contact the experts at prancer. We offer a pre and post-deployment could validation framework for IaC that supports continuous compliance. A team member will be happy to answer all your question and get you started on the road to better cloud security and compliance.