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Security and Compliance in the Continuous Delivery World
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Security and Compliance in the world of everything “Continuous” can be frightening to most of the engineering and IT heads. External regulations like HIPAA and SOX applies to every organization. Few industries like healthcare, digital payment service providers, financial services, and listed companies have stronger compliance needs.

DevOps, the enabler of Continuous Delivery, has enabled businesses to innovate fast, frequent product upgrades and releases. But some businesses are finding their IT teams pressed with challenges to manage stable IT infrastructure for scheduled development work while taking care of the stringent compliance requirements. This limits the role of IT teams in innovation and put them back in the firefighting mode of traditional IT teams.


Futuristic technologies and applications cannot withstand trade-off between innovation and adhering to security and compliance, as most of the customer-facing applications hold personal data of customers making it high risk for exposing it to potential security threats. The middle path is to adopt CD in such a way that it aids IT, teams, to reduce the challenges of infrastructure management and do more innovation and ensuring security and compliance. Here are a few things to ensure security and compliance in the CI-CD journey

Assess compliance requirements in the beginning

Before beginning your CD journey, ensure you have well-documented compliance requirements that help in building the complete CD pipeline to take care of your security and compliance practices in the form of a code with a continuous build, test, security tests, performance tests, and deployment. Security and compliance must be viewed as the part of automating infrastructure and continuous testing before applications get deployed.

Automate Compliance Management

CD is practiced in its truest form when businesses will have automated every process in the CD pipeline. Automating infrastructure management with DevOps tools such as terraform, chef, puppet etc. helps in ensuring consistency in environments. Secured and compliant environments can be accessed by developers using infrastructure as code tools while replicating the enforced security measures and compliance practices. Replicating secured and compliant environment can be created as a repeatable and consistent process without getting IT teams involved and act as watchers if there’s any inconsistency in the environment. This also ensures a continuous feedback loop incomplete CD cycle for compliance requirements to ensure fast remediation of any bugs.

Just like infrastructure as code, compliance as code is very much doable. Compliance requirements can be coded that ensures that every change request or bug fixes are adhering to the compliance and security practices leaving a trail of changes done by the developers. Stating clear requirements in form of code makes it easy for developers to understand what is expected out of compliance adhered application. Compliance tests can be run to ensure that there are no deviations in the application before it reaches the deployment phase. The automation capabilities of CD can be extended to security and compliant practices so that even compliance standards are consistent and repetitive.

During audits, it becomes companies to show auditors about every code or change made and thus, ensuring transparency and visibility in the organization as well as with regulatory authorities.

The Qentelli Way

Qentelli has setup DevOps Operations Centre for many enterprise customers in Banking and Financial sector, to ensure that Security and Compliance are met for both applications and infrastructure, and continuous monitoring is provided on the various environments with real time alerts and notifications sent to appropriate stakeholders. Qentelli’s AI-driven DevOps solutions provide predictive analytics to help identify issues before they occur and provide prescriptions to resolve the issues.

To learn and explore more in detail about Qentelli’s AI-driven DevOps implementations and DevOps Operations Centre, please write to us at info@qentelli.com. Our experts will be delighted to engage with you. 

About Qentelli

Headquartered in Dallas, TX with global delivery teams in India, Qentelli is an Industry Thought Leader in Quality Engineering, Automated Testing and Continuous Delivery. With high performing engineering teams working in the dedicated Innovation Group, Qentelli brings design thinking to address complex business problems and enables Continuous Delivery across Enterprise IT through automation for its global customers.

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