Getting Started with Compliance as Code
Tags: javascript, webdev, programming, tutorial
Published: 2022-08-12 13:30:20

Another area where the shift-left trend is well-established is Compliance with regulations and self-imposed obligations. Your team may produce a secure, low-risk Code faster by integrating Compliance into your workflow and using Compliance as a code approach. On the road to production, Compliance as code techniques ensures that the proper regulatory or corporate compliance standards are completed without human intervention. It incorporates Compliance into both operations and development. 

By defining how resources must be configured, Compliance with code technologies gives stakeholders the ability to guarantee that production processes are compliant. These solutions can frequently automatically adapt resources into a compliant state to satisfy these pre-established compliance standards thanks to such a framework. 

For large businesses, especially those subject to complicated legislation, this kind of minimal-friction Compliance is an essential solution (such as enterprises operating in healthcare or financial services). Compliance can be incorporated into the DevOps lifecycle to improve workflow and save developers valuable review and testing time. 

 
 

How do you put Compliance into practice? 

Management, Compliance, internal audit, PMO, and infosec leaders must come together to define Compliance as code policies at the outset. Together, they will create the rules and manage the workflows. Throughout the pipeline, management must know how operational hazards and other risks will be managed. 

How your team is organized will affect how your firm establishes Compliance with code regulations, but transparency is necessary regardless of how your teams work together. Consider implementing the following rules to make sure information is shared, and choices are taken jointly: 

Peer reviews: The first review cycle for bigger changes should be manual to ensure no modifications are made without at least one other person checking the change. To guarantee the quality of the review, reviewers can be allocated at random. 

Static application security testing: In addition to human reviews, every code update should undergo static (or white box) testing. 

Review by subject-matter specialists for high-risk Code: Changes should be reviewed by a subject matter expert for Code that the management team identifies as high-risk (such as security code). 

Regulated access restrictions: Management must maintain access controls to prevent modifications from being made by a single engineer and to ensure that each change is processed via the workflow and is accessible to anybody with access to the dashboard. 

 
 

The Function of Compliance as a Code 

People typically create compliance rules with a non-technical background in brief, simple language that is simple to understand. Still, for it to function, the rules must be converted from the non-technical format to Code. Compliance as a Code means that the developer must transform the requirements and rules into machine-readable Code. This conversion's primary goal is to separate compliance standards' definition, application, and enforcement from the Code. 

Examining the Code and any new changes are carried out with Compliance as Code tools, which cause the proper actions to be triggered whenever a change occurs. Tools monitor code changes and application modifications to ensure that nothing new compromises the Compliance of the regulations. OPA is one of the most well-liked and effective compliance solutions available today (Open Policy Agent). 

 
 

Why is Compliance with the Code required? 

The biggest advantage of adhering to the Code is that you can create tests instead of configuration. You can be more specific when developing tests than writing or authoring Code. 

 

Here are four reasons why firms require Compliance with a code: 
 

CI/CD pipeline and Compliance as a code 

Greater visibility of the various rules evaluated at each stage of the software development life cycle is made possible with compliance-as-code aid. The security team can better assess the risks when compliance-as-code techniques like shift-left security are used early in the software development lifecycle. Additionally, early adjustments made by the development team can result in on-time delivery, cut cycle time, and enable both teams to work more quickly. 

A compliance audit trail and Code 

Using Compliance-as-a-Service to validate and audit compliance Code, which relies on programmatic techniques, aids in achieving a very high degree of precision. Scalability is also easier even in cloud environments; when Compliance depends on manual processes, the results may be too error-prone because humans tend to make mistakes. The provided programmatic techniques can be scaled up to fit the environment and verify compliance status if the environment is scaled up. Thus, it is relatively simple to create process repeatability, which lowers the overall effort needed to deploy and maintain compliant workloads. 

 

The gap in Compliance Knowledge 

Compliance-as-code made it a mandate to include controls and compliance standards in various business operations. It aids in closing the knowledge gap in Compliance. Prioritizing the compliance activities is also beneficial. For illustration, suppose one of your automatic reports provides a list of 20 non-compliant programs. As a result, you can quickly order them according to how urgently your company needs them. Additionally, it simplifies the routine reporting process and aids in achieving transparency over the entire compliance process so that management can monitor it easily. 

 

Agile with Compliance as the standard 

When using compliance-as-code, all of the checks are automated, and the compliance rules are written as Code. Therefore, you may rapidly rerun your compliance checks to confirm the compliance status following minor adjustments. Additionally, it offers programmatically defined automatic evidence gathering, which simplifies audit planning and evaluation. The ability to test, version, and group compliance rules into bundles, known as compliance bundles, is one of the major benefits of having compliance rules written as a Code. To improve the visibility of the compliance status, compliance infractions can also be gathered, presented, and reported to a central dashboard. 

 

Conclusion 

Management, Compliance, internal audit, development, and implementation are all brought by Compliance as a code. All interested parties must collaborate to define the compliance and control policies and rules. Managers must be aware of the procedures for managing operational risks and other pipeline hazards. Possibility of incorporating their specifications into the Code so that their organizations can access those artifacts on their teams at scale and, ultimately, allow Compliance to be another quality assurance component in the software you deliver. It is wise to regularly check on the systems' Compliance and to show external or internal auditors proof of this check-up.