Cloudockit for DevOps: Pinpoint Areas of Non-Compliance and Vulnerabilities in Your DevOps Environment

Software development is a complex – and risky – process involving multiple teams and dependencies. The trend toward shift-left and Agile development has led to the adoption of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, where developers work to implement and manage incremental code changes before building, testing, and merging it with a shared repository for deployment. In this primarily cloud-based development environment, multiple developers work simultaneously on the same codebase, making frequent commits to the code repository.

While this approach helps to accelerate innovation and enables teams to deliver new products to market faster, mistakes are bound to happen. This can create vulnerabilities that expose software applications to malicious activity:

- Shared, open-source code repositories imply granting access to many people.
- Build server and container misconfigurations are common, potentially resulting in faulty software.
- Secrets, keys, and credentials can be exposed, enabling unauthorized access.
- Poorly managed security settings and access controls are a golden opportunity for hackers.
- Without continual monitoring, vulnerabilities can remain in the environment indefinitely.

You don’t need to look too far for examples of compromised development environments – high-profile open-source software supply chain attacks surged by 650% in 2021. DevOps teams can improve the security of their development environments by ensuring the proper compliance rules, policies and procedures are in place and enforced at all times – but how?

Visibility Is an Essential First Step

When you can see all of the assets in your environment, it’s much easier to pinpoint potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations – and work to eliminate them – by implementing best practices and compliance rules designed to protect cloud assets in the DevOps environment. That’s where Cloudockit comes in.

Cloudockit is a simple tool that automatically generates diagrams and technical documentation of your cloud environment. It’s an excellent solution for DevOps teams looking to strengthen security in their CI/CD pipelines. This tool scans the DevOps environment and generates highly visual architectural diagrams that illustrate the various on-premises and cloud assets associated with the CI/CD pipeline, along with all the configurations and connections between them.

But that’s not all! Cloudockit’s Compliance Module reveals misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and other problems that could compromise the environment.

Here’s how it works:

- Compliance rules from major cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud are built into Cloudockit out-of-the-box, but you can add any number of standard rules by simply selecting them from a list.
- Cloudockit also provides the flexibility to edit built-in compliance rules to meet your needs or create your own custom rules.
- Upon the next scan, Cloudockit applies the rules and automatically flags points of non-compliance using warning icons in the diagrams, indicating precisely where potential vulnerabilities are.
- Points of non-compliance are also highlighted in the technical documentation, along with links to articles explaining how to fix them.

In the architectural diagram, compliance rules are broken down into five categories – availability, best practice, security, performance, and billing – and warnings are color-coded, so you can instantly see what areas need attention. For example, there may be no availability warnings, but there may be a performance warning; while users can access the service, a performance issue on a storage volume may be slowing down service delivery. Seeing this information at-a-glance helps you prioritize your remediation efforts.

Are you ready to include Cloudockit into your DevOps pipeline and easily pinpoint vulnerabilities?

Try it today!

Schedule Scans to Monitor and Enforce Compliance Over Time

Scheduling Cloudockit to scan the development environment on a regular basis helps DevOps teams understand the impact of changes. Once the initial points of non-compliance are addressed, scanning the environment at regular intervals will reveal new issues and vulnerabilities that may not be causing problems now, but could later on.

Cloudockit also enables you to send diagrams and technical documentation to specific drop-off locations – GitHub, Confluence, or any storage account – to provide immediate access to whoever needs them. These documents are read-only, so you don’t have to provide special permissions. Team members can download the reports and act on the insights they provide without delay.

Alternatively, you can generate and receive documentation directly from the pipeline using Azure Pipelines or Bitbucket. Having this documentation on hand empowers you to proactively address issues that may interfere with DevOps activities or service delivery that would otherwise slip by unnoticed until a problem surfaced.

Optimize Your Development Environment Today

Cloudockit makes it easy to strengthen the performance and security of your DevOps environment with immediate insights into non-compliance issues. Try Cloudockit for free today to see how it can help you streamline compliance and optimize your DevOps environment, ensuring misconfigurations and vulnerabilities don’t get in the way of delivering innovative software products to market.

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