Empowering DevOps with robust policy management

IT managers create different policies to allow software programs to run in various machines and domains. They also delineate restriction policies to prevent untrusted code from running in any system. Large enterprises enforce some policies that are mandated w.r.t HIPPA or SOX laws. The notion of policy enforcement is to maintain the reliability and availability of the entire IT ecosystem.

But why has “the policy” become important in DevOps?

DevOps team is responsible for creating and continuously deploying software, and along with compliance managers, they have to ensure software adheres to all the policies. Otherwise, a small error or omission can have widespread consequences for an organization that can extend far beyond SDLC of their software applications. 

Similarly, there are policies pertinent to deployments which the team needs to enforce to avoid compromise to business-critical applications. Examples of such policies are- time to deploy a release or patch, days in a week, or month for deployment activities to avoid IT unavailability, restrictions of deployments on servers in specific locations.

For example, every time a developer merges code in Github, it needs to be built, tested, and deployed with proper policy checks. DevOps team notifies compliance managers through JIRA or ServiceNow to perform their inspections. After the manual checks, someone would approve the ticket, following which the DevOps team would trigger the deployment of the changes. The process is time-consuming and increases the overall rollout schedule. Moreover, enterprises operate the whole process in a non-integrated and siloed way. So compliance managers cannot in real-time propagate policy changes from a central place to all their stakeholders.

At OpsMx, we have incorporated the process of policy and compliance enforcement by incorporating policy validations & compliance checks into Spinnaker pipelines and taking away the dependencies of manual checks. 

Some of the features of the OpsMx solution for compliance are:

1. Ability to check if your pipeline stages are executing as per the policy guidelines. If not, Spinnaker will automatically terminate the pipelines with the cause.
2. Policies can be defined and evaluated in a third-party policy management system and integrated using web calls. 
3. Ability of Spinnaker pipelines to react to your policy or governance changes in real-time.

With new policy enforcement ideology – no more delays, nor more risks!

For more information, watch the video:

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

OpsMx is a leading provider of Continuous Delivery solutions that help enterprises safely deliver software at scale and without any human intervention. We help engineering teams take the risk and manual effort out of releasing innovations at the speed of modern business. For additional information contact us.