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

Open Policy Agent

As we have seen in the previous chapter, there are a lot of policy engines out there. OPA is one of the most popular policy engines out there and will be the focus of this chapter.

This section will discuss OPA, its architecture, and components, with a brief tutorial on installing it and testing some policies. Next, we will show some use cases of deploying OPA and the use cases it can help with.

Introduction

OPA is an open source project created as an abstraction layer for policy decisions across different environments, applications, and microservices. OPA's main strength is building on its expressive language, Rego, which we will discuss in another section.

As we discussed in previous chapters, a policy can be a set of best practices, procedures, guardrails, and standards to help achieve a goal. These policy engines, such as OPA, focus more on authorization, which corresponds to coercive instruments.

OPA and other policy engines (PEs) allow...