The enterprise can use cloud to simplify IT operations, unlock faster deployment, enhance innovation and scalability, and lessen the workload of DevOps engineers. However, many organizations today don’t feel or benefit from these values as they just migrate existing infrastructure and applications without any modification. This is often because lack of understanding or time restrictions. Instead, organizations need to set up processes and design that improves consistency and reliability in the cloud.
Benefits of IaC
To unlock the full benefits of the cloud, many organizations use Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) – an approach to automate infrastructure and configuration management using code and scripts. These minimal codes can create repeatable infrastructure configurations that ensure reliability and consistency when provisioning systems or changing their configurations. In addition, they can be automatically tested, versioned, inventoried and more. When integrated into CI/CD pipelines, these code blocks and scripts can unlock extensive infrastructure automation and scalability.
Key Challenge
At NCC Group, we work with thousands of clients across the globe to improve their overall cloud security posture. This work gives us a unique perspective into the key challenges faced by organizations currently using, or looking to use, IaC to automate cloud infrastructure.
Across the past year, one of the biggest challenges that our clients faced was proactively detecting and preventing vulnerabilities presented in IaC.
This prompted our Research Team to take a closer look at the following method for testing static IaC with dynamic tooling and the possibilities it offers:
Integrating a mock up environment and running dynamic security tools on IaC code in a CI/CD pipeline before it is deployed.
While we hope you found our outline of the testing IaC using dynamic tooling useful, it is also important to note that the blog post only a proof of concept to show that it is indeed possible to use dynamic tools on static IaC code.
Innovate with IaC and Dynamic Tooling Securely
Using IaC and Dynamic Tooling doesn’t have to come at the cost of compromising the strength of your cloud security. NCC Group can help you achieve governance security through the cloud and help you develop a security improvement plan through our Cloud Security Assessments and Managed Detection and Response services. Contact Us
If you are looking for a partner to assist in Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), DevSecOps and review the security posture of your cloud environment, including company-specific assessments and recommendations to cover attack paths and avoid data leaks, contact us today.
More Information
If you want to learn more, we have other in-depth resources available. Check out our open-source cloud security tools such as ScoutSuite, PMapper, Racoon, or read our more technical research post on testing infrastructure-as-code using dynamic tooling.