In an ever-evolving business landscape, with escalating complexities brought about by emerging technologies, a question looms: is it time for an organisation to deploy a management approach that can automate the compliance process to vital policies?
This is where Policy-as-Code (PaC) can come in. Red Hat defines it as "an approach to policy management in which policies are defined, updated, shared, and enforced using code."
"What this means is that it automates the compliance process, where the business logic is translated from a spoken language into machine language or codified," explained Prem Pavan, vice president and general manager of South East Asia and Korea at Red Hat.
"Managing governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) across IT solutions is essential for most organisations, but enforcing policy can slow application development and create friction. These challenges can be addressed by automation," added the RedHat executive.
When there is predictable and seamless capability to apply policies, organisations can gain more confidence in their technology stack because it is operating more consistently.
Prem Pavan
Benefits and advantages
In an article, RedHat has listed several benefits of the PaC approach. These include the ability to automate testing of policy-enabling scale, enforce style guides and security rules, provide traceability for compliance, centralise rules, control, and management, codify policies, and maintain version control. These benefits can significantly enhance an organisation's GRC management.
According to Pavan, an automated PaC can significantly boost confidence in critical application compliance. Organisations can apply cloud resource control checks without manual coding or other manual steps, helping ensure that critical applications are always in compliance with the organisation's policies, enhancing overall security.
He added that it could improve developers' productivity through self-service capabilities for new environments, which automatically provision and align to policies and automate additional business or security rules without manual approval.
"When there is predictable and seamless capability to apply policies, organisations can gain more confidence in their technology stack because it is operating more consistently," he added.
According to Pavan, one of the key advantages of an automated PaC is its role in managing cloud costs. Organisations are always looking for ways to manage and contain the cost of cloud resources while maintaining a focus on security, and PaC can help by automating the process and ensuring resources are used efficiently.
PaC and skills/talent gap
"Automating Policy as Code can help address the productivity drains IT teams face," said Pavan.
Research finds that IT teams grapple with constant pressure to become more productive and cost-efficient despite widening skills and talent gaps, dynamic business needs, and an evolving technological landscape while maintaining an organisation's security posture.
"In this current landscape, any type of enterprise looking to adopt automation to increase productivity and scale deployments while managing governance, risk, and compliance can benefit from adopting PaC," Pavan said.
In this current landscape, any type of enterprise looking to adopt automation to increase productivity and scale deployments while managing governance, risk, and compliance can benefit from adopting PaC
Prem Pavan
He believes that automating policies with PaC can serve as a bridge across the skills and talent gap, offering a hopeful solution to reduce human error and enhance productivity.
Common inhibitions
Despite its advantages, implementing PaC among organisations still needs more awareness as some inhibitions still need to be addressed.
"Many organisations face challenges when introducing or upgrading technology. Some common barriers to adoption include technological, financial, organisational and psychological factors," Pavan said.
He noted that introducing a new approach to policy management may entail financial investment from an organisation. Moreover, there could be resistance from the people involved in using or supporting PaC. Pavan highlighted the need to align it with the organisation's culture, processes, and goals for effective change management.
"While organisations need to align to internal and external policies to control cost, reduce risk and maintain consistency to stay agile, automating is a smarter approach to internal and external GRC management," he added.
Questions CIOs should ask
Pavan said that to prepare for PaC operations, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) must first evaluate their current automation journey and identify the appropriate areas to automate.
When considering the adoption of PaC, CIOs should ask themselves a series of questions. These include: Are there opportunities to extend existing automation use cases? Which manual and routine tasks are the most time-consuming for teams? Are there opportunities to automate workflows across technical domains? Do we comprehensively understand what is currently operating in our cloud environments? These questions can help CIOs assess their organisation's readiness for PaC adoption.
"This is an essential initial step that CIOs should adopt before considering workflow automation, followed by building automated compliance into the organisation's technology stack, and finally implementing an automated PaC model aligned with the organisation's needs," he said.
Best practice
Automation can be a valuable tool for enforcing policies that can otherwise be manually enforced, potentially slowing down business operations and productivity.
Pavan considers automating with PaC a 'best practice' for organisations, helping them stay compliant, manage complexity, reduce risk, and deploy demanding applications with the speed and agility that business stakeholders expect.
