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As your applications grow and become more complex, so can your worries about the risks to your environments and ensuring they comply with your system policies and regulatory standards. While administrators deal with audits and other routine work, they also need to work on planned projects.
DevSecOps teams could manage their endpoints with existing tools for small fleets of devices, but challenges arise when you begin to scale. This is where Chef InSpec comes into the picture.
In this blog post, you’ll take a look at some practices that can help you get a running start with your Chef automation and the principle of Policy as Code. It’s intended for any IT professional or Chef newcomer.
This post is designed to be beginner-friendly. You don’t need any coding experience to follow along — just an interest in automation, and curiosity about how best to implement it with Chef. That said, let’s define some terms before we dive in:
Heads up: This blog belongs to our integrating Okta with popular infrastructure series. If you aren't into Chef, there are alternatives such as our Ansible, Puppet, and Terraform tutorials.
If you need to manage infrastructure at scale, Chef cookbooks are for you. However, like other configuration management tools, Chef is best when cookbooks don’t change a lot. You can accomplish this using typical server setup and configuration tasks, such as installing Nginx and tweak conf file. Once your server gets more traffic, it can become more difficult to manage the server and accounts. As people leave or join your ops team and you need to rotate server keys things can get tricky.
To meet the demands of an ever more connected world, executing on a comprehensive cloud strategy has become a critical component for organizations at any scale. While cloud platforms have made it incredibly easy to define and scale environments on demand, with those capabilities come new challenges in how to validate that those environments have been securely designed. With high-profile data breaches making headlines on a regular basis, it's only natural to feel some anxiety, but by implementing a process for continuous, automated audits, organizations can detect and correct deviations from security best practices at any scale.
To put a finer point on the challenges facing cloud security, CSO published The Dirty Dozen: 12 Top Cloud Security Threats. In this article, CSO outlines 12 threats collected and ranked by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), providing examples and outlining the severity of each threat. In our latest webinar, Secure Your Cloud Estate with Continuous Audits, we provided guidance on how organizations can use Chef to address those threats consistently and continuously.