Leveraging Concourse Labs for a Unified Approach to Security-as-Code
This is the fifth blog in a five-part series from TAG Cyber that informs developers, cloud platform engineers, and security practitioners of the challenges and opportunities of cloud security-as-code. This blog will demonstrate what a unified approach between developers, cloud platform engineers, and security practitioners can achieve with Concourse Labs to control risks to the cloud and applications in development and runtime.
Author: David Neuman, Senior Analyst, TAG Cyber
Research Coordinator: Nick Wainwright, Research Analyst, TAG Cyber
In the previous four blogs, we have explored various aspects of cloud security-as-code, highlighting the stakeholder personas of developers, cloud platform engineers, and security practitioners, along with valued outcomes for these teams and the business. In this fifth and final blog of our series, we will delve deeper into the specific advantages Concourse Labs offers to developers, cloud platform engineers, and security practitioners. We will discuss the benefits of building controls into the CI/CD pipeline, maintaining consistent visibility, and automating drift remediation without hindering business progress or application innovation. Finally, we will examine the business outcomes from the unified approach.
Concourse Labs provides an innovative platform that enables organizations to incorporate cloud security-as-code practices into their development and operational workflows, enabling greater efficiency of all stakeholder teams. With a unified approach from these teams, businesses can achieve seamless collaboration between developers, cloud platform engineers, and security practitioners, ensuring that security controls are embedded at every development lifecycle stage. This not only reduces risks but also accelerates application innovation and growth.
The Advantage of Cloud Security-as-Code for the Developer
In our first blog, we explained that developers value time to market for products and features, integration of processes, automation of everything, and continuous learning. One significant advantage is the streamlined security integration, allowing developers to incorporate security controls into their existing development processes seamlessly. This reduces the learning curve and ensures a smooth transition to security-as-code practices. Additionally, early detection and remediation become possible as developers can identify and fix security issues early in the development lifecycle. This reduces the need for time-consuming and costly security fixes later.
Another advantage of Concourse Labs is the acceleration of innovation. With security controls integrated into the Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, developers can focus on building new features and functionality, confident that security requirements are being met automatically. This empowers developers to push the boundaries of their creations while maintaining the necessary security standards.
The Advantage of Cloud Security-as-Code for the Cloud Platform Engineer
Like developers, cloud platform engineers have their own set of values. They are driven to effectively manage and maintain cloud infrastructure, ensuring scalability, flexibility, automation, security, and cost-effectiveness. A notable advantage of cloud security-as-code is the ability to maintain compliance, as Concourse Labs assists engineers in ensuring that cloud resources and configurations comply with organizational security policies and industry regulations.
Additionally, engineers can automate resource management, allowing them to automate cloud resource provisioning, modification, and decommissioning. This ensures that security configurations are applied consistently and efficiently. This provides the valuable benefit of monitoring and managing multi-cloud environments. With visibility and control across multiple cloud platforms, engineers can more easily manage complex, multi-cloud environments, streamlining the process and making it more efficient. This level of oversight and management is crucial for maintaining the security and functionality of modern cloud infrastructures.
The Advantage of Cloud Security-as-Code for the Security Practitioner
Our last stakeholder, the security practitioner, also has a distinct set of values and requirements. They are concerned with protecting the organization from a cyber breach and ensuring products and technology conform to compliance and regulatory obligations. This often clashes with the values or outcomes of the other two groups. Security practitioners can benefit from Cloud security-as-code in several ways, including comprehensive visibility. It gives security practitioners a holistic view of an organization’s security posture, enabling them to identify and prioritize risks effectively. This level of insight is crucial for maintaining the security and integrity of an organization’s infrastructure and data.
Another advantage for security practitioners is automated policy enforcement. By defining and enforcing security policies as code, security practitioners can ensure that security requirements are consistently applied across applications and environments. This standardization not only increases overall security but also streamlines the management of security policies.
Lastly, proactive threat detection is a valuable benefit provided by Cloud security-as-code. It affords the opportunity to continuously monitor the security posture of applications and environments, offering real-time feedback and proactive remediation of security risks. This ongoing vigilance is essential for staying ahead of evolving threats and maintaining the highest level of protection for an organization’s assets.
The Benefits of a Unified Approach by All Three Teams
Integrating security controls into the CI/CD pipeline is crucial for maintaining a robust cloud security posture. When using cloud security-as-code, organizations define and enforce security policies as code, ensuring a consistent approach to security across applications and environments. In addition, by integrating security testing into the development process, developers can identify and fix security issues early in the development lifecycle. This proactive approach can save time and resources while mitigating potential risks.
Continuously monitoring the security posture of applications and environments is another critical component of a robust security framework. It provides real-time feedback and proactive remediation of security risks, allowing organizations to stay ahead of emerging threats and maintain a strong defense against potential vulnerabilities.
Visibility into the security status of cloud environments and applications is essential for effective risk management. This can provide a comprehensive view of your organization’s security posture, enabling you to track security compliance and policy enforcement across multiple environments and cloud platforms. This visibility allows you to identify and prioritize security risks based on their potential impact and monitor changes to cloud resources and configurations, ensuring adherence to security best practices. This consistent visibility enables organizations to make informed decisions about cloud security and risk management strategies.
Configuration drift is a common challenge in cloud environments, where changes to resources and configurations can introduce security risks. Cloud security-as-code automates identifying and remediating drift, helping organizations detect unauthorized changes to cloud resources and configurations. Automation can automatically prevent changes that violate security policies, reducing the window of exposure to potential threats. Furthermore, it can generate alerts and notifications for security incidents, allowing for rapid response and remediation, keeping organizations secure and resilient in the face of evolving threats.
The Business Value
As organizations continue to embrace digital transformation and migrate their workloads to the cloud, having a unified approach to cloud security-as-code provides technological, security, and development operations benefits and positively impacts the business as a whole. By adopting this approach, companies can achieve a higher level of agility, enabling them to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, customer needs, and regulatory requirements. In addition, a cloud security-as-code approach built on Concourse Labs’ comprehensive platform reduces the likelihood of costly security breaches. It ensures business continuity, protecting brand reputation and customer trust.
Furthermore, the seamless collaboration between developers, cloud platform engineers, and security practitioners enabled by Concourse Labs fosters a culture of innovation and continuous improvement within the organization. This culture empowers teams to deliver high-quality applications and services to the market faster, providing a competitive edge in today’s fast-paced business landscape. The streamlined and automated security processes offered by Concourse Labs also lead to significant cost savings by reducing the need for manual intervention and minimizing the potential for costly security incidents. Ultimately, implementing cloud security-as-code strengthens an organization’s security posture and translates into tangible business benefits, driving growth and competitive advantage.
Conclusion
Concourse Labs unifies the approach to cloud security-as-code by enabling developers, cloud platform engineers, and security practitioners to collaborate effectively and address security risks throughout the development and operational lifecycle. By leveraging the advantages offered by Concourse Labs, organizations can ensure that security is integrated into every aspect of their cloud environments, promoting accelerated application innovation, consistent visibility, and effective drift remediation. This, in turn, supports a secure and compliant cloud infrastructure that fosters business progress, innovation, and agility, ultimately translating into long-term growth and success for the organization.
About TAG Cyber
TAG Cyber is a trusted cyber security research analyst firm, providing unbiased industry insights and recommendations to security solution providers and Fortune 100 enterprises. Founded in 2016 by Dr. Edward Amoroso, former SVP/CSO of AT&T, the company bucks the trend of pay-for-play research by offering in-depth research, market analysis, consulting, and personalized content based on hundreds of engagements with clients and non-clients alike—all from a former practitioner perspective.
Copyright © 2023 TAG Cyber LLC. This report may not be reproduced, distributed, or shared without TAG Cyber’s written permission. The material in this report is comprised of the opinions of the TAG Cyber analysts and is not to be interpreted as consisting of factual assertions. All warranties regarding the correctness, usefulness, accuracy, or completeness of this report are disclaimed herein.
