Learn more about Posture Control, our 100% agentless solution built to identify hidden risks across the cloud life cycle caused by a combination of misconfigurations, threats, and vulnerabilities.
Business requirements and DevOps adoption are seeing applications delivered and deployed faster than ever before. This trend can have a negative effect on both the compliance and security realms, where regulations and cyberthreats are constantly evolving.
When developers are unaware of the compliance requirements—or these requirements are inaccessible—vulnerabilities can be introduced into the production environment. Organizations need to combat this by bridging the gap between security and DevOps teams as the responsibility and accountability for security rapidly shifts towards DevOps engineers.
The problem stems from a reliance on manual processes and siloed tools that can’t keep pace with development velocity and continuous release cycles. You need to give your developers a frictionless, collaborative platform that allows them to quickly identify and fix issues so that they can enforce consistent security policies and compliance—without sacrificing speed.
IaC security should:
Before we further discuss the importance of IaC security, let’s take a look at exactly what IaC is and why it matters for modern operations.
Infrastructure as code (IaC) is descriptive code, commonly written in markup (JSON, YAML, etc.) or proprietary languages (e.g., Terraform HCL), used for provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure resource configurations. Infrastructure as code provides increased productivity and agility, reduces human error, provides standardization for deployment, and maintains version control of the infrastructure configuration.
IaC tools come in many forms—from dedicated infrastructure management platforms to configuration management tools to open source, there is a plethora of options available. Some of the most popular choices include HashiCorp Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Azure Resource Manager.
IaC comes with a number of benefits that mainly focus on flexibility and speed. It allows you to:
These benefits negate the need for time-consuming manual configuration and reduces the risk of human error. Plus, they enable engineers to institute version control, which allows DevOps teams—let’s cover this in a bit more detail.
IaC allows IT teams to manage and provision data centers through written files. Not only does this reduce the cost of building and running applications, it also makes it easier to share data across teams as well as automate script writing—all of which lighten the load on DevOps teams when they're tasked with creating cloud apps.
What’s more, IaC allows DevOps teams to provision and run a multitude of test environments, and they allow developers to be more diverse in their language use if need be. With this added flexibility, these teams can hunker down and focus on building, testing, and running high quality applications in less time and at a lower cost.
However, by these same tokens, IaC can also make infrastructure more vulnerable.
IaC offers operational benefits, such as quick provisioning of IT infrastructure in a declarative approach rather than an imperative approach. However, its impact on security presents a major challenge due its potential impact on resources.
If a single resource is manually misconfigured, the scope of the mistake is limited to that resource alone—but making one mistake in code that can be used to automatically provision 100 or more resources presents a far greater security risk.
Achieving comprehensive IaC security is a challenge for organizations. It can bring a great many benefits, but it can also create dangerous vulnerabilities.
Infrastructure as code may leave your organization at risk of:
IaC security takes a “shift-left” approach to securing code. Namely, developers and DevOps engineers receive security feedback on their code earlier in the process. IaC security gives devs such visibility by:
With these processes in place, SecOps teams are readily notified of any issues that need fixing before an app is deployed.
Here are some of the security best practices for IaC that can be easily integrated into the development lifecycle:
During IaC operations, you must identify, tag, monitor, and maintain an inventory of deployed assets. Untagged resources should be carefully monitored as they’re difficult to track and cause drift. Whenever the resources are retired, their associated configuration must be deleted and data should be secured or deleted as well.
Ideally, configurations across developers’ environments are uniform. But application owners sometimes need to make modifications to their applications and the underlying infrastructure. Without proper monitoring or tools, the unchecked accumulation of these leads to configuration drift which can leave the infrastructure exposed and create gaps in security and compliance.
Sensitive data such as secret keys, private keys, SSH keys, access/secret keys, and API keys hardcoded in IaC can provide easy access to underlying services or operations and help attackers move laterally. Having exposed credentials spread through IaC code, which is committed to source control (e.g. GitHub), can be of great risk for organizations.
Developers' accounts need to be secured from attackers. It is important to harden and monitor developers’ accounts, track changes in IaC configurations, and verify that the changes are sanctioned and intentional. Unauthorized changes can cause IaC template or configuration tampering that may result in a code leak.
Security teams need to have a single point of control that enables consistent management of privileged accounts, credentials, and secrets across each of the development and compute environments. It enables them to govern current and future privileged credentials usage, detect access configuration issues with required context, right-sizing of identity access and permissions, and consistent least-privileged policy enforcement.
Security teams should enforce cloud-native policy guardrails that incorporate checks to secure multi-cloud infrastructures from configuration drifts and alert on violations, enforce consistent security policies during build and runtime, and deliver clear guidance to developers on how to resolve vulnerabilities and risks. For instance, one may want the CI/CD build to fail, in case a certain security threshold was not met.
We’ve made one thing clear: IaC can greatly benefit your organization, but it comes with security risks you can’t ignore. To get the most out of IaC, you need a cybersecurity partner that has built a solution with DevSecOps in mind, mastered cloud data protection, and above all, will help you get the most out of your IaC investment. That partner is Zscaler.
Posture Control is a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) designed to help your development and security teams work together to build a comprehensive infrastructure as code (IaC) security program from the ground up.
Visibility and Control
Continuous Assessment
Enhanced Productivity
Alerting
Learn more about Posture Control, our 100% agentless solution built to identify hidden risks across the cloud life cycle caused by a combination of misconfigurations, threats, and vulnerabilities.
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