Enterprise Guide to Policy as Code: Design, Build, and Runtime

As the adoption of cloud native architecture increases throughout organizations, we are faced with the challenge of how to ensure that security best practices are embedded into systems that are under frequent change. The problem is that traditional security approaches do not take into consideration the evolving and complex nature of systems in the cloud.

Solving these challenges requires a proactive security approach, where the policies that are important to your organization are consistently enforced with automation. Policy as Code (PaC) allows us to codify security requirements in order to programmatically evaluate our infrastructure provisioning templates and environment. When PaC is integrated into our infrastructure provisioning processes, security and operational issues can be discovered and mitigated early.

In this paper, you will learn how to use Policy as Code to ensure security policies and best practices are adopted continuously throughout the design, build, and runtime operations of your system’s development lifecycle to enable moving beyond point-in-time assessments and tooling that focus exclusively on securing the runtime environment. Learn more about:

• Design: Security and operational policies can be enforced early in design time, locally, before any code is pushed to a source control repository.
• Build: Integration into build pipelines allows PaC to detect violations and risks, preventing issues from being introduced into the runtime environment.
• Runtime: PaC can be used to detect and enforce compliance to policies at runtime in order to maintain a consistent security posture.