Manage Endpoint Compliance as Code

Being compliant with growing security and compliance regulations in today's world of rapid innovation is a constant challenge that affects all organizations, large and small. Enforcing a comprehensive compliance strategy that involves a robust set of controls, such as acceptable data storage locations and access control management, while ensuring that these are followed at scale is critical to the success of a digital business.

The consequences of not adhering to compliance rules are severe: Reports suggest that a regulatory compliance violation can cost businesses $15 million on average.

While it was previously possible to manually manage compliance with dedicated security teams, the rapid pace of modern software delivery and increasing fleet sizes have transformed how organizations see and handle security strategies. Tighter regulations in the industry and the risks associated with security attacks and compliance violations have led organizations to implement automated solutions and eliminate reliance on traditional, slow, error-prone manual processes. This means, compliance-as-code is required for today’s organizations that need security as a fundamental part of business processes.

Compliance-as-code has changed the way security processes are implemented within organizations. Teams can automate compliance by adopting an engineering mindset and writing understandable code, thereby streamlining audits, and allowing individuals to focus on higher-value activities.

What is Compliance-as-Code?

The codification of your compliance controls to automate their adherence, application, and remediation is known as compliance-as-code.

It includes the tools and practices that enable you to incorporate the three key compliance activities: prevent, detect, and remediate.

1. Avoid non-compliance by automatically verifying that planned changes are compliant.
2. Detect non-compliance through automated estate scanning and notify stakeholders when offending infrastructure is discovered.
3. Correct non-compliance by implementing immediate infrastructure changes to ensure the highest level of compliance on a scale.

Compliance-as-code tools typically function by allowing compliance stakeholders to specify how IT resources must be configured to meet compliance controls. Then, the tools automatically scan or monitor the live IT environment and plan changes for non-compliant infrastructure. Furthermore, compliance-as-code tools frequently include functionality that enables them to automatically modify resources based on pre-defined rules to bring them to compliance.

Use Cases of Compliance as Code

As the size of your fleet grows, so does the possibility of non-compliance. The use-cases that will have the greatest impact on the compliance of your fleet are determined by three factors:

The following are the use-cases to consider when it comes to managing the compliance of endpoint state as code:

Managing Endpoint Compliance through Code with Chef

Balancing security with growing infrastructure needs means IT security and compliance are non-negotiable today. For far too long, this has meant uncomfortable trade-offs between risk and an organization's ability to deliver market-ready solutions quickly and efficiently. Whether they are required to adhere to regulatory standards, lack visibility across heterogeneous infrastructure and applications, or are unable to remediate findings, most enterprises struggle to stay secure and compliant.

Progress® Chef® Desktop™ helps across the following stages for compliance:

1. Acquire: Customers can gain access to trusted content that is aligned with industry benchmarks for auditing and remediation. Organizations can get started quickly with extensively tested, Chef-curated, and CIS-certified content, ensuring remediation actions are directly aligned with audit results.
2. Define: Chef makes it simple to define compliance baselines and tailor them to the specific needs of the organization. To avoid false positives and misconfigurations, teams can use flexible compliance waiver capabilities to turn individual controls on and off.
3. Detect: Constantly monitor and assess compliance stance by sensing deviations from the envisioned state at any point in the deployment lifecycle.
4. Remediate: Fix non-compliance using policy-driven remediation capabilities that efficiently address individual controls in alignment with audit tests, encoding those fixes to enable continuous compliance. Remediation is simple to implement and does not necessitate coding knowledge.
5. Report: Maintain thorough and up-to-date visibility across heterogeneous estates, easily view distinctions between threshold and mitigated states, and track exemption status always to enable rapid and precise audits.

Chef Desktop enables IT resource managers to consistently enforce security based on industry standards such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks. Users can also create custom profiles to meet any enterprise role-specific infrastructure or compliance policies, allowing IT resource managers to detect and automatically correct security or compliance issues to ensure continuous compliance.

Benefits

• Managing endpoint compliance-as-a-service code assists organizations in gaining visibility throughout the ecosystem. Users can easily understand what is going on across the organization in terms of compliance status at any time. The organization can keep an audit log of everything that occurred throughout the development lifecycle and calculate an appropriate risk acknowledgment rating. It also assists organizations in evaluating any deviations from fundamental compliance requirements.
  

• Chef Desktop enables organizations to scale compliance requirements easily and correctly across the entire IT fleet. The systems can be easily reinforced and tested to ensure compliance once the obligations have been converted into codes and scripts, then finally organized into compliance bundles. It improves the efficiency of IT administrators because these automated checks allow the entire team to inspect the compliance status at any time without bothering or requiring assistance from the security team, which can then focus on other security challenges. When requirements change, the security team can simply publish a new compliance bundle.
  

• Understanding the compliance requirements is the most difficult problem to solve when managing fleet through compliance-as-code. Typically, documents featuring compliance requirements are dense and difficult to comprehend. Compliance-as-code solves this problem by transforming compliance requirements into automated, easily understandable scripts and codes that anyone can validate without having to read the entire compliance functions and specifications.
  

• This specific Chef product lowers the cost of managing, auditing, and ensuring compliance across a heterogeneous fleet of devices. It facilitates the collection of evidence and the generation of audit reports in a timely and efficient manner. Finally, it also contributes to the scalability and dependability of compliance status.

Managing diverse IT fleets through compliance as code ensures that endpoint devices meet a variety of security standards. It enables the IT team to create rules that can be used to enforce compliance and establish security baseline standards within the organization. It makes compliance checks that are validated at each stage of the software development lifecycle more visible, therefore guaranteeing not only detailed visibility but  thorough compliance throughout the IT ecosystem.

Join Our Webinar to Learn More

Join the discussion with Nischal Reddy, Senior Product Manager & Sudeep Charles, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Progress® Chef® Desktop™ to learn

• Using tools to gain deep insight into organization's operations
• Automating compliance checks in your workflow pipelines
• Focusing on workflows with unified pipeline for compliance & dependency management.

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