Book Image

Policy Design in the Age of Digital Adoption

By : Ricardo Ferreira
Book Image

Policy Design in the Age of Digital Adoption

By: Ricardo Ferreira

Overview of this book

Policy as Code (PaC) is a powerful paradigm that enables organizations to implement, validate, and measure policies at scale. Policy Design in the Age of Digital Adoption is a comprehensive guide to understanding policies, their design, and implementation for cloud environments using a DevOps-based framework. You'll discover how to create the necessary automation, its integration, and which stakeholders to involve. Complete with essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book will help you understand policies and how new technologies such as cloud, microservices, and serverless leverage Policy as Code. You'll work with a custom framework to implement PaC in the organization, and advance to integrating policies, guidelines, and regulations into code to enhance the security and resilience posture of the organization. You'll also examine existing tools, evaluate them, and learn a framework to implement PaC so that technical and business teams can collaborate more effectively. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the confidence to design digital policies across your organizational environment.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Foundation
5
Section 2: Framework
10
Section 3: Tooling

Summary

As you have seen in this chapter, there are quite a few policy engines out there in the community. We selected some, but this was not a comprehensive list.

We decided to introduce Kyverno, as it is one of the competitors to OPA.

We also touched on PSP and PSA. While not being policy engines in the definition of the word, they can still be useful for basic use cases when a full-blown policy engine is not necessary.

OSCAL, despite not being a policy engine but a standard of exchanging information, ties into this topic of policies as it can be used as the medium to represent how controls are being enforced, paving the way for automation in the risk and compliance functions in the organization throughout.

We also touched on Sentinel, which, depending on the organization and relationship with the HashiCorp ecosystem, can be an interesting approach despite not being free; a paid plan is required.

Finally, we also approached quite a novel policy engine, jsPolicy. From...