Whether you are working in a financial company, healthcare department, or any heavily regulated industry, DevOps compliance is often the first thing that comes in your mind when you think about streamlining efficiency or improving adherence. Compliance is mandatory to move to DevOps.
Manual compliance in a DevOps culture is slow and it often relies on numerous inspections. Apart from that, the chances of errors are also very high in this case. To keep the DevOps compliance a continuous process, you need to automate it. Automation is mandatory as it will save your time, reduce errors, and benefit in many other ways as well. However, the main concern is how to automate compliance in a DevOps culture. Don’t worry, we are here to guide you in this regard.
How to Automate DevOps Compliance?
Automating DevOps compliance requires a series of procedures. The following section is all about the steps involved in automating DevOps compliance. Without further ado, let’s delve into the details of these steps.
Step 1: Define Compliance Policies
You need to start with defining compliance policies. Develop solid strategies based on the rules and regulations implemented in your industry. When you have well-defined compliance policies, it helps you in automating compliance in a DevOps culture. In fact, these policies serve as a foundation for the whole automation process.
Step 2: Implement IaC Practices
The next step is to implement IaC practices. IaC stands for Infrastructure as Code. Implementing these practices assists you in defining and managing infrastructure in a version-controlled repeatedly. Implementing these practices manually can be difficult. However, you can get help from some tools to implement IaC practices to create easily understandable infrastructures.
Step 3: Continuous Integration
You cannot automate DevOps compliance by using a single tool. The integration of different software programs implemented in your industry is required for the automation of compliance in a DevOps culture. This integration helps in improving overall business strategies and then their implementation.
Step 4: Implemented Automated Testing
You need to test security and compliance for the automation process. This testing can be done manually as well as automatically. However, automating the testing is the best option. You can get access to tools to implement automated compliance testing. You can integrate these testing into different pipelines such as CI or CD as well. This integration helps in the detection of various challenges you may have to deal with at the early developmental stages.
Step 5: Managing Configurations
Configuration management is all about keeping the infrastructure, software, and hardware implemented in your industry, in a desired state. This management is required to make sure that your business systems work as per your expectations. Therefore, managing configurations is one of the primary things you need to do when automating compliance in a DevOps culture. It will keep things aligned when they are proceeding automatically and you will get expected results.
Step 6: Setting Up Monitoring and Alerting Mechanisms
The next thing you have to do is to set up a monitoring and alerting mechanism. When things process in an automated fashion, they need to be monitored regularly. You cannot manually monitor and automate processes. Therefore, you must implement a mechanism that monitors the whole automation process.
Apart from that, you must pay heed to the alerting system as well. Whenever something wrong is detected via a monitoring mechanism, the alerting system will let you know about it. As a result, you will be able to handle it as soon as possible.
Step 7: Implementing Change Management Tool
A lot of changes take place when you automate compliance in a DevOps culture. Change management in DevOps is mandatory to keep the whole automation process streamlines. To manage changes, you need a robust software program. A robust change management tool like Kosli is the right pick to handle all the changes during this automation.
Takeaway.
Automating the DevOps compliance will help you in getting desired results. It reduces errors and saves a lot of your time as well. To automate the whole process, you need to get assistance from different software programs. The most important of them is Kosli which will help you manage changes throughout the automation process.
