Policy-as-Code for Enterprise Networks: Security and Compliance in Automated Infrastructure Deployments

Big, automated deployments are difficult to handle nowadays. Due to the rapid changes in business networks today, it is quite challenging to keep them updated, safe, and secure. DevOps and IaC nowadays enforce policies in different ways. These must now be done in a more secure manner and with adherence to rules. Policy-as-Code is an innovative and better approach toward handling compliance and security updates. It describes rules in computer-understandable syntax; thus, the same can be enforced consistently at scale, either in the cloud, on-premises, or possibly both. The current paper provides an overview of the concept of Policies-as-Code within enterprise networks and how this will lead to a future of automation around compliance and security, reducing human errors and making audits easier to perform. We also discuss various advantages and disadvantages of using PaC and its tools for building automated infrastructure and their role in ensuring the compliance of rule-governed CI/CD pipelines. We conclude by describing how the results of future research could influence the path ahead for PaC within a continuously changing rules and technology landscape.

Automated Policy Enforcement CI/CD Pipelines Compliance as Code Compliance Automation DevOps Enterprise Networks Hashicorp Sentinel Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Network Security Open Policy Agent (OPA) Policy-As-Code (PaC) Regulatory Compliance Security as Code Security Automation

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