Benefits of policy as code
1. Benefits of policy as code
Policy is one of the most important factors of security, but maintaining policy is complex, takes time, and people make mistakes. A mistake in enforcing policy can cause major problems. What if you could save time while reducing the potential for human error? Well, you can using policy as code. Cloud security engineers enforce policies like the creation of virtual machines, limiting access to resources, and more. While these can be done manually, there are benefits to using policy as code. These benefits include: implementing updates at a large scale, providing fast feedback about compliance, preventing mistakes, and avoiding violations and penalties. Let’s start with implementing updates at a large scale. Updates to policies across many resources can be automated using policy as code. Imagine security cloud engineers are setting policy for an e-commerce retailer. They need to apply the same policy changes to many resources at one time. They use policy as code to automate updates to all of their resources, reducing the manual process which could take several hours or even days. Another benefit to using policy as code is fast feedback about compliance. Going back to the example, the retailer’s security team decides to automate policy enforcement for compliance purposes. Doing so provides the team faster feedback about compliance than if employed using a manual approach. Whether policies are automated or updated manually, humans make mistakes. These mistakes can cause big, expensive problems especially when done on a large scale. Suppose the retailer’s security team automates the creation of virtual machines. They accidentally provision hundreds of large-size machines, which isn’t appropriate for their use case. This costly mistake uses up a lot of resources. Thoughtful implementation of policy as code can prevent mistakes. Another benefit to consider when using policy as code is avoiding violations and penalties in order to comply with government and industry standards. Security teams can code the controls from the standards into the policy to ensure compliance. As a cloud security professional, it’s important to remember that policy that works right now may not always work. Policies may need to change. Technology changes too, and sometimes policy causes new problems with new technology. It’s a good idea to keep track of all the different versions of your policies. That way, you can go back to an earlier version of your policy configuration if there are problems. Now you know about the benefits of policy as code. As a cloud security professional, you can use these benefits to your advantage in order to maintain security standards and compliance.2. Let's practice!
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