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Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) Solutions for Compliance
Enhance the security and compliance posture of your fleet with quick orchestration
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What Is Security Orchestration?
Security orchestration is the process of bringing together and automating various security and compliance tools, processes and workflows to enhance the security posture of the IT fleet. Orchestration helps identify and respond to threats faster by enabling flexibility in automating change rollouts.
With Progress® Chef® orchestration, administrators experience improved control over actions in their fleet, whether that is automating routine tasks in case of known issues or rolling out patches across targeted sections of the fleet. This enhances the overall security posture and helps support continuous adherence to regulatory requirements like PCI DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA, etc.
Importance of Orchestration in Security
One of the greatest challenges for organizations today is the need to both ensure compliance with regulatory standards and implement a strong security strategy that proactively addresses potential threats. When it comes to security and compliance, speed is crucial. Threats need to be identified and minimized quickly to help maintain business continuity and uninterrupted services.
This is why orchestration is at the core of any security or compliance strategy. Without more seamless job orchestration, organizations will struggle to control actions across the IT infrastructure in a customized and targeted manner. This can severely delay the incident response time when threats or vulnerabilities emerge.
Key Benefits of Security Orchestration
Quick Response With Automated Workflows
Orchestrating security includes automating repetitive tasks with workflows. This can help detect threats early and respond quickly to incidents while minimizing human error.
Continuous Threat Intelligence
By bringing tools together and analyzing data from multiple sources, DevSecOps teams can continuously evaluate security insights to stay ahead of threats and mitigate the impact of attacks with rapid response.
Maintain Fleetwide Compliance
Orchestration can trigger continuous scans through compliance tools to identify issues and take pre-defined actions on flagged nodes. These detection and remediation orchestration workflows can help organizations avoid the legal and financial ramifications of non-compliance.
Always Audit-Ready
Security orchestration can simplify the audit process by providing centralized visibility into the security policies of the entire IT estate. This results in a more streamlined audit reporting process and builds stakeholder confidence in the organization’s security and compliance posture.
Security Orchestration with Chef
Scanning
(Examples)
- Run a STIG Profile on nodes containing a specific application
- Check for access levels on every new Kubelet
- Run a security scan every night based on pre-set conditions on specific set of nodes
Remediation
(Examples)
- Run custom commands to change user access after a security incident
- Rollback/Upgrade a software version on specific operating system versions alone
- Apply remediation action only on targeted sections of the fleet based on pre-defined rollout conditions
Chef Platform
Node Manager
Orchestrator
Chef offers robust automation capabilities across infrastructure, compliance and cloud security. Here we list out the key features of Chef when it comes to security orchestration:
Enhanced Security Posture
Orchestration, when combined with the compliance automation capabilities of Chef, gives administrators finer control over their security and compliance postures of devices in the fleet.
For example, with orchestration, administrators can run Chef compliance scans on-demand or schedule security scans based on pre-defined conditions like “run a scan every Friday at 8 p.m. on nodes running a specific operating system’’. This level of control allows administrators to create customized conditions for various levels of security/compliance based on location, device type, OS, application version, etc.
Increased Efficiency
Orchestration speeds up existing automation processes and saves time by providing more control and customization. Chef can help increase efficiency as individuals can flexibly orchestrate time-consuming tasks and instead focus on more impactful work.
Cross-Team Collaboration
Chef promotes active collaboration among DevSecOps teams with its ‘policy-as-code’ approach, which turns infrastructure, compliance and security policies into human-readable code. By breaking down silos and bringing teams together, orchestration not only improves efficiency but also democratizes DevSecOps by distributing responsibility across teams. As a result, no one is over-burdened with responsibilities during security incidents or unplanned business downtimes.
Flexibility at Scale
Orchestration adds a new dimension of flexibility within Chef. Consider these examples:
- Orchestrate a job to run a Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) profile on nodes containing a specific application
- Run custom commands to change user access after a security incident
- Quickly rollback/upgrade a software version on specific operating system versions
This levels of flexibility enables administrators to control actions across every node in the fleet and maintain the desired state of policies throughout the day.
Orchestration for Remediation
Administrators can create their own threat response cookbooks within Chef and orchestrate the execution of these cookbooks based on pre-defined conditions such as automatically downgrading user permission after a security threat or shutting down a node after several failed login attempts. This speeds up the remediation process in case of known incidents and helps prevents issues from impacting the continuity of operations.
Try Chef for Security Orchestration
While security is a priority for all organizations, security strategies can often be complex, especially with teams working in silos and relying on multiple, fragmented solutions. Chef helps address this challenge by bringing DevSecOps teams together through unified infrastructure, security, compliance and orchestration capabilities. Enable your teams to maintain more consistent security and compliance postures and control change rollouts across the fleet with Chef.
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