Cloud Engineers Try Policy-as-Code to Cure Misconfiguration Woes

Cloud engineers are looking to policy-as-code to prevent cloud misconfigurations, according to "The State of Cloud Security 2021 Report," which surveyed 300 US cloud engineering and security professionals.

Jul 29th, 2021 10:22am by Lawrence E Hecht

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Cloud engineers are looking to policy-as-code to prevent cloud misconfigurations, according to “The State of Cloud Security 2021 Report,” which surveyed 300 US cloud engineering and security professionals. It found that adoption of open source policy as code has increased in the last year, going from 31% in last year’s study to 39% saying it is a way they prevent cloud misconfigurations. While open source is popular, so too are vendor tools for compliance checking, which jumped from 41% to 47%.

Policy as code has risen to the fore due to concern about cloud misconfiguration, but also as part of a larger effort to automate the entire software and cloud development/deployment lifecycle. How it is implemented remains to be seen. Writing a policy may be the easy part. Maintaining, testing and enforcing policies across multiple CI/CD pipelines and cloud environments will be trickier.

Lawrence has generated actionable insights and reports about enterprise IT B2B markets and technology policy issues for almost 25 years. He regularly works with clients to develop and analyze studies about open source ecosystems. In addition to his consulting work,...