Policies are the guardrails for managing risk and maintaining compliance in today‘s dynamic technological landscapes. But as business velocity accelerates, traditional methods of manual policy management struggle to keep pace. Policy changes take too long, lack consistency, and become outdated too quickly.
This is where policy-as-code comes in – encoding policies as executable code to enable real-time governance aligned to business objectives. Leading organizations are using policy-as-code to implement security policy changes in hours rather than months.
But what exactly is policy-as-code, how does it work, and why should you care? This comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you need to successfully adopt policy-as-code in your organization.
What is Policy-as-Code?
Policy-as-code (PaC) is the practice of declaring policies as code files that can be executed, validated, and continuously updated. It works by encoding business policy logic as executable queries against a policy engine.
For example, let‘s look at a simple policy controlling production access to cloud resources:
# Allow production access only to approved services
allow = product_group=="ApprovedServices"
deny[msg] = product_group!="ApprovedServices"
main = rule {allow} else = rule {deny}We can see core elements of a declarative policy:
- Policy decisions: allow/deny control logic
- Policy parameters: product_group variable
- Policy execution: main rule invocation
This policy acts as continuously enforced guardrails, preventing unapproved services being deployed to production.
Policy-as-code evolved from infrastructure-as-code practices. But rather than directly provisioning resources, policy-as-code focuses on governing those resources. It creates the policy layer to validate provisioning.
Why is Policy-as-Code Important?
Policy is essential for managing risk, maintaining regulatory compliance, and ensuring service reliability. But manual policy management has many downsides:
Slow change velocity: Updating documents and config files is cumbersome. Policy changes take months.
Lack of validation: No way to test policies before deploying to production environments.
Policy drift: Siloed policies become outdated as documentation rots. Controls degrade over time.
Inconsistency: Interpretation of policies varies across different internal teams. Controls are implemented differently.
Limited visibility: Stakeholders can‘t see policies impacting them. No single source of truth.
Research shows 76% of organizations have faced data breaches due to gaps in security policies in the past 2 years.
Policy-as-code provides solutions to these issues through executable policies which serve as the single source of truth. Core benefits include:
- Faster changes: Update policies in code rather than documents
- Testability: Validate policy logic through CI/CD pipelines
- Prevention of drift: Policies remain evergreen as code in version control
- Consistency: One policy schema used across the enterprise
- Auditability: Changes are logged and automatically documented
Forrester predicts that 70% of organizations will adopt policy-as-code methods by 2025, with security policy management emerging as an early use case.
Real-World Policy-as-Code Use Cases
Policy-as-code use cases span multiple domains:
Cloud Infrastructure Governance
- Validate cloud resource provisioning in CICD pipelines
- Preventdrift by enforcing tagging policies
- Limit access by geography, user attributes
Kubernetes Configuration Governance
- Set resource quotas for namespaces
- Prevent unsafe pod or container settings
- Alert on excessive cluster permissions
Application Security Policy Management
- Enforce OWASP Top 10 mitigation requirements
- Block high risk software components
- Mandate code quality gates in SDLC
Access Policy Management
- Codify least privilege permissions
- Implement context-based access controls
- Remediate excessive user permissions
Compliance Policy Controls
- Standardize controls across regulations
- Continuously validate against frameworks
- Produce audit reports on demand
Expense Management
- Set approval gates for cost spikes
- Enforce limits and quotas by department
- Prevent wastage through unused resource policies
Let‘s explore a customer example demonstrating the power of policy-as-code in action.
A large financial institution historically managed thousands of enterprise security policies in PDF documents. But with rapid cloud adoption, the manual approach couldn‘t keep pace. Hundreds of invalid configurations were introduced, increasing risk and compliance failures.
By adopting RedHat‘s policy management solution, policies were codified to enable continuous validation. Policy decisions were integrated into existing CI/CD pipelines to prevent misconfigurations early. Within months, compliance findings were reduced by 92% while improving security team productivity 4x.
This real-world impact shows the potential of policy-as-code to accelerate secure innovation.
Key Capabilities of Policy-as-Code Solutions
While policy-as-code capabilities share common elements across tools, key features can vary:
| Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Policy DSL | Domain-specific language to author declarative policies |
| Execution Engine | Evaluates policies against current state to make decisions |
| Integration Runtimes | Enables policy decisions to execute actions |
| Policy Testing | Facilitates testing policy logic through simulated queries |
| Event Processing | Consumes stream data to dynamically evaluate policies |
| Version Control | Manages policies through full revision histories |
| Visualization | Charts relationship between policies for understanding |
| Analytics | Produces reports to optimize policies over time |
Two open source tools demonstrate different approaches:
Open Policy Agent (OPA) provides a general purpose policy engine with a reusable decision API. It focuses on solve integration complexity through a robust policy SDK.
Backstage Policy Server delivers domain-specific policy templates tailored for engineering teams. It lowers barriers to policy authoring through intuitive interfaces.
Commercial solutions like Styra DAS, Fugue, and CloudGuard layer enterprise capabilities like dashboarding, workflow integrations and federated policy management onto open core engines like OPA.
Choosing the right policy-as-code platform depends on your organization‘s use cases, extensibility needs and skillsets. We‘ll cover detailed capability comparisons later in this guide.
Step-by-Step Implementation Guide
Approaching policy-as-code transformation requires planning across people, processes and technology capabilities:
1. Build a Policy-as-Code Coalition
Identify key stakeholders from infosec, engineering, GRC and leadership. Socialize benefits to build buy-in for PaC adoption.
2. Launch a Pilot Project
Start with a limited initial use case like cloud tagging governance. Measure efficacy before expanding scope.
3. Select a Policy-as-Code Tool
Evaluate leading platforms against organization criteria. Open source vs cloud vs on-prem. Prioritize ease of use through policy templates.
4. Develop Foundation Policies
Catalog existing policies. Encode fundamental guardrails around access, spend, trust levels.
5. Integrate Policy Decisions
Inject policy checks into existing pipelines and workflows. Enforce policies proactively vs retroactive scanning.
6. Operationalize Policy Feedback Loops
Analyze policy query results to fine-tune logic. Add exemptions, expand data sources.
7. Expand Across More Use Cases
Once successful, roll out policy-as-code to additional applications, environments and requirements.
Top 5 Open Source Policy-as-Code Tools
While numerous tools exist across different capability niches, these 5 open source options provide great places to start:
Open Policy Agent
- General purpose policy engine and framework
- Integrates as reusable decision API
- Extensible through custom plugins
Backstage Policy Server
- Specialized for engineering team self-service
- Prebuilt templates for quick wins
- Tight integration with Backstage ecosystem
Stapler
- Python policy engine with Jupyter integration
- Facilitates interactive authoring
- Built-in visualization dashboard
Confusion
- YAML based policies
- Focus on testability using simulated queries
- Integration tester to evaluate implementations
Pomerium
- Specialized for context-aware access policy
- Controls based on user identity, device, IP
- Proxy authorization plugin architecture
For additional options, check the Cloud Native Computing Foundation‘s full landscape of policy projects.
Policy-as-Code Best Practices
Following security best practices will maximize your policy-as-code success:
Use Templates
Start with preset templates around common use cases to accelerate authoring. Customize as needed.
Small Focused Policies
Modular policies increase understandability. Combine through hierarchical relationships.
Encode Guardrails
Focus policies on preventing bad things vs trying to allow all good things. Default deny.
Test Early and Often
Build test cases to validate policies before applying changes. Simulate queries against local engine.
Tie Policies to Risk
Tag and annotate policies based on risk category and impact levels for better traceability.
Analyze Policy Decisions
Aggregate decision logs to identify policy gaps needing new controls. Continually optimize.
Enable Self-Service
Streamline how engineers access and customize allowed policy templates through self-service.
The Critical Role of Governance
Governing how policies are authored, approved, monitored and enforced ensures quality and consistency:
- Owners designated to maintain different policy domains
- Review processes for PR based changes with security oversight
- Audit history of all modifications tracked in version control
- Automated testing against policy schema validity, wordlists, linting
- Observability into policy decision telemetry and enforcement
- Drift detection through recurring scans to detect deviations
Formal governance catches issues early and enables continuous improvement of the policy layer.
The Future of Policy-as-Code
While still maturing, innovations in policy-as-code capabilities are accelerating:
Graph-based analysis derives hidden insights like overlapping, redundant and conflicting policies through relationship modeling. It reveals optimization opportunities.
ML-assisted authoring leverages techniques like natural language processing to simplify policy writing for non-experts through smarter suggestions and autocorrection.
Running policies in sandboxes evaluates the impact of proposed changes in isolated environments before enforcing changes. What-if analysis aids risk management.
Embedded policy engines distribute policy decisioning closer to the data plane for microservices through lightweight edge agents. This increases policy performance.
As policy management converges with observability data pipelines, the volume, variety and velocity of policy queries will expand exponentially. Cloud scale stream processors will enable dynamically computed access controls based on real-time risk signals.
Policy-as-code serves as the foundation for the real-time, responsive and intelligent policy engines of tomorrow.
Start Enforcing Policies as Code Today
Managing security policies through traditional documents and configs is no longer sustainable. Policy-as-code provides a modern paradigm to tame exponential complexity through executable guardrails.
This guide covered all aspects of adopting policy-as-code – from core concepts to real-world examples and actionable frameworks for implementation success.
Now is the time to start taking advantage of policy-as-code to enforce critical controls across clouds, applications, endpoints and beyond. Regain visibility and prevent risk – before the next breach or outage strikes. Choose from mature open source options or emerging commercial solutions to kickstart your program today.
What potential use cases does your organization have for policy-as-code transformation? I welcome your thoughts and questions in the comments below!
