Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The simplest way to ensure the safety of all the open source (OSS) components used by your teams and sites, is with a software composition analysis (SCA) tool. You need an automated and reliable way to manage and keep track of your open source usage. With JFrog Xray, you can set up vulnerability and license compliance scanning built into your software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Most of you are familiar with the roles and profiles method of writing and classifying Puppet code. However, the roles and profiles method doesn’t have to exist only in your control repository. In fact, as I’ve been developing Puppet code centered around compliance, I’ve found that adapting the roles and profiles method into a design pattern to Puppet modules makes the code more auditable, reusable, and maintainable!

The first two posts in our compliance blog series focused on managing compliance through automation. In this third post, we take a step back to explore a more foundational — but no less important — topic: What’s the difference between compliance and security? Is compliant infrastructure secure infrastructure? People often talk about compliance and security as though they’re one and the same.

In the first post of this series, we provided guidance for managing the many facets of a compliance program — taming the “compliance beast.” While there are many factors to consider, I’d argue that none is more essential than a reliable means of enforcement.

As government agencies accelerate migrating their operations to the cloud, they need to adhere to strict compliance and security standards. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) provides the standard that these agencies—and their private-sector partners—must meet to work and manage federal data safely in the cloud.

Are you struggling to keep up with manual compliance across your infrastructure? In this 25-minute episode of the Pulling the Strings podcast, powered by Puppet, learn how Puppet Comply makes automating your configuration compliance easy -- with full view dashboards and the ability to assess, remediate and enforce all through the Puppet Enterprise solution. Listen in and discover:

Regulatory compliance is time-consuming and expensive. A recent survey of IT security professionals found that, on average, organizations must comply with 13 different regulations and spend an average of $3.5M annually on compliance activities, with audit-related activities consuming 232 person hours per year. With a team of five people, that adds up to 1.5 months a year devoted to audit-related activity. That’s a lot of hours that could have been spent on initiatives driving customer value.

If you are running a user-facing web application, you likely implement some form of authentication flow to allow users to log in securely. You may even use multiple systems and methods for different purposes or separate groups of users. For example, employees might use OAuth-based authentication managed by a company-provided Google account to log in to internal services while customers can use a username and password system or their own Google credentials.

Many of our customers rely on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Framework as a guide to build safe, secure, and performant applications in the cloud. AWS offers the Well-Architected Review (WAR) Tool as a centralized way to track and trend adherence to Well-Architected best practices. It allows users to define workloads and answer a set of questions regarding operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.