Compliance as Code and Applied DevOps. DevOps is only important when organizations are fully aware of their concepts. One should need to understand important disciplines of DevOps in order to take full advantage of it. The essentials include coding, testing, configuration management and monitoring of each step.
If we talk about DevOps configuration management, it is a crucial part of DevOps as it allows all the tiresome tasks to be automated to save time and boost business flexibility. Similarly, when it comes to applied DevOps, compliance as code is the key. This idea is often considered by companies that use DevOps for special purposes. By integrating compliance for your workflows, the DevOps team can create a secure code while saving a great amount of time.
Furthermore, in DevOps configuration management, compliance as code has achieved a significant boost in DevOps configuration Audit. This puts great emphasis on the compliance requirements like division and assigning of tasks between developers and operations, monitoring changes, which can run in a DevOps environment with help of standard controls.
So, what is compliance as code?
If we look at the definition of compliance as code, it can be simply defined as explaining the requirements of compliance in such a language which is understood by both humans and machines. This method guarantees that the company’s compliance requirements are met. Work can be simplified and valuable time of development and operations can be saved by incorporating compliance into DevOps process.
The testing is also carried out in a short time and deployment is done swiftly.
Let’s see what compliance as code can really do for your business success.
Implementing “Compliance as Code” in the Development Process
The ability of an organization to automate reporting, implementing, and monitoring of compliance. To implement compliance as code, compliance policies should be codified and testing should be carried out in order to clear the integration stage. Integrating compliance as code into the system comprises a couple of key steps that we will discuss later in this article.
Furthermore, in order to make compliance as the integrated component of the deployment process, compliance needs to be defined as a code. Compliance as code policies needs to be predefined. By involving everyone who is part of the team in the process which includes defining the compliance as code policies and the entire production process of software, everyone takes part in the DevOps process.
The structure of the team within an organization will help in creating policies for compliance as code. You can make use of guidelines like peer review, high-risk code review, access control and security testing of a static application. These guidelines can play an important role in ensuring the rules, regulations, and other important factors are visible to everyone in the team.
Peer Reviews: here any reviewers can be selected to manually review the changes in order to maintain the standard of review
High-risk code review: code which is labeled as high risk, changes which are made in order to solve the issue should be reviewed by an expert of belonging to that particular subject.
White box testing for static application: All the code changes should go through white-box testing with the addition of manual reviews
Access Control: access should be properly managed in order to make sure that any change made to the code is not reviewed by a single reviewer and the changes should go be passed to every workflow and viewed by anyone with access to the dashboard.
Key Phases for Successful Implementation of Compliance as Code
Let’s jump to the three key stages which we have previously mentioned. It is common knowledge that the success of DevOps and code compliance depends on the multi-step strategy.
Decluttering Waste and Team Organization: Anything that does not add value to the project or fails to add value is labeled as “waste” and should be removed. In this stage, streamline the current process by eliminating waste and recycling where possible. Compliance is made easy if the primary focus is given to the key tasks of the process. Scale the process by adding automation to the process in order to release the products in a timely and efficient manner.
Moreover, the team involved in DevOps compliance should be assembled and organized carefully. In order for the DevOps process to work without any hindrance and failure, simplify and automate the process.
Introducing Compliance as Code and Security:
In this stage, compliance as code is introduced in the process where safety and quality is added as in the initial stages. This helps in maintaining and meeting the compliance need but also ensuring the quality at the time of deployment. Graphic user interface (GUI) testing should be predefined.
Furthermore, for better security and provision of solutions for security issues, continuous compliance offers a much-needed security solution. It contributes to the DevOps environment where the team consists of a developer, operations, and security work together.
Automation
In this stage, automation is the key for DevOps process success. By incorporating the automation in the DevOps development cycle, you can easily consolidate the DevOps data in all the tools.
These stages help in incorporating the compliance as code to meet the business needs without failure. These stages may be different for other projects’ needs as each organization has a different need and end goal.
Conclusion
From developers to third parties, everyone involved in the project can get the most out of compliance as code when it is incorporated from the beginning. As compliance as a code is significant in the applied DevOps process, teams involved in the development lifecycle can benefit from it by speeding up the work without delay and timely delivery without errors and on time bug fixes. Other benefits of having compliance as code are that the developers and operations will spend less and less time on code fixes and more on making the product efficient for the end-user. They will not have to back and forth to fix the error and security testing will be introduced earlier in the whole process. Furthermore, DevOps reports offer documentation and records to help administrators to monitor and optimize all review policies.
