Last updated at Tue, 20 Aug 2024 19:43:15 GMT

It's the cloud's world now, and we're all just living in it. The mass migration of organizational infrastructure to the cloud isn't slowing down any time soon — and really, why would it? Cloud computing has allowed developers to move at vastly greater speeds than ever before. And this in turn lets businesses move at greater speeds than ever before. What could go wrong?

If you're reading this blog, you probably already know the answer: data security and regulatory compliance. With so much development, testing, and deployment happening all the time, it's far too easy for infrastructure misconfigurations, compliance violations, or other risks to slip through the cracks.

Right now, these risks are most often found and addressed at runtime, after the proverbial barn door has already been left open and the horses are long gone. It's obviously not ideal to have developers racing around trying to fix security issues that have already gone live and put the organization at risk. It's also not all that optimal for those developers to constantly have to drop their current projects to put out security fires.

So our beleaguered security teams are stuck acting as the organizational killjoys constantly pumping the brakes on development, while developers are left unable to take full advantage of the speed cloud offers them. The bottom line: No one's happy.

The power of infrastructure as code

This, of course, is where our favorite catchy slogan “shift left" comes into play. What organizations need to address all these issues is to shift security left, earlier in the development cycle. This shift allows teams to catch misconfigurations before they go live and expose an organization to risk. In this way, shifting left also keeps security from becoming a bottleneck for development. And it keeps both DevOps and SecOps happy — with their processes and with each other.

So how do you make this rosy picture a reality for yourself and your organization? The key is infrastructure as code (IaC). Traditionally, you would need to create security infrastructure by hand. But the IaC approach replaces manual creation with declarative statements that define the infrastructure needed to run code. Essentially, IaC turns the creation of security infrastructure into a shared, programmatic task within and between teams that can easily be replicated as often as needed.

By evaluating these IaC templates before runtime, developers are empowered to build more secure applications. The IaC templates provide the structure and feedback developers need to understand and resolve risks, and integrate security and compliance into all parts of the CI/CD process. With this, DevOps can become the primary safeguard against misconfigurations and risk without overly disturbing their established workflows.

All in all, IaC helps increase the speed of deployment, reduce misconfiguration and compliance errors, improve the relationship between developers and security, and lower costs.

Getting started with IaC

At this point, you may be thinking, “OK, shifting left with IaC sounds great — but how do I make that happen?"

There's no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. Not all tools for IaC and shifting cloud security left are created equal. And the type of tool you need will depend on the specific characteristics of your own organization. But if you're looking to bring the IaC revolution home to your organization, there are a few crucial points to keep in mind.

  • Make use of both static and dynamic analysis. These are the two main approaches for shifting left using IaC. Static analysis is faster but more limited in scope, whereas dynamic analysis is slower but more accurate, as it analyzes not only the IaC template but any environments or services the template works with. You'll need access to both approaches to properly safeguard your cloud.
  • Be sure the cloud security tool you choose supports not only the cloud environment you currently use, but also any you might expand to in the future. Not all tools support all cloud environments. Whatever tool you invest in needs to fit the current state of your organization, without imposing limits on your future growth. This also applies to CI/CD orchestration tools: Any IaC tool you acquire should be compatible with your CI/CD tools, and not all of them will be.
  • Keep the total number of IaC tools to a minimum. Modern cloud security is complex enough as it is, and excess tools will only multiply the headaches for Dev and SecOps exponentially.
  • Consider where and how different security policies need to be used. Depending on their nature (say, public vs. private) and the kind of information they hold, different clouds may need different policies. Policies may also need to be enforced differently for different stages of the CI/CD pipeline. You'll need a tool that's flexible enough to manage all of these scenarios effectively.

Rapid7's own cloud security tool, InsightCloudSec, is a fully integrated solution enabling continuous security and compliance for complex, multi-cloud environments. InsightCloudSec allows you to shift cloud security left using IaC, catching and remediating misconfigurations and vulnerabilities before they go live.

With InsightCloudSec, security and compliance in the cloud doesn't have to slow you down. Learn more here.