SOC2 is a compliance standard that measures a company’s ability to securely manage customer data. As part of the audit process, companies must demonstrate that they have effective controls in place to ensure the security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of customer data.

Managing cloud infrastructure with Terraform can greatly assist companies to meet SOC2 compliance requirements in several ways:

• Consistency: Terraform management provides a consistent way to manage infrastructure across environments, ensuring that security controls are consistently applied.
• Auditable: Managing your Terraform code in a version-controlled and auditable manner can help demonstrate compliance with SOC2 requirements.
• Automation: Automating your Terraform deployment reduces the risk of human error and ensures that controls are consistently applied.
• Security: Adding security checks to your Terraform deployment to ensure compliance, such as resource-level access controls, encryption, and secure network communication.
• Reporting: Audit reporting is an essential aspect of compliance and security, as it allows companies to demonstrate that they have effective controls in place and are meeting regulatory requirements. 

Overall, using Terraform management tools as part of a comprehensive security program can help companies meet SOC2 compliance requirements and demonstrate their commitment to security best practices.

Today, ControlMonkey has launched a new solution to help companies achieve and maintain their SOC2 compliance. Check out our new solution page to see how ControlMonkey can help with your SOC2 compliance. ControlMonkey assists with:

• Environment separation: Ensuring that different environments are isolated and managed separately to maintain security and compliance.
• Audit reports: Provide detailed audit reports for your auditor to demonstrate compliance.
• Standardized deployment process: Streamlining the deployment process for infrastructure updates with approvals, ensuring consistency and control.
• Security and compliance tests: Enabling shift-left methodology by integrating security and compliance tests into your infrastructure deployment process.

If you’re about to run your SOC2 audit, check out our new solution to save time and ensure your infrastructure is always compliant.
With ControlMonkey’s assistance, you can confidently navigate the SOC2 compliance process and demonstrate your commitment to maintaining the highest security standards for your customers’ data.

Today, we are happy to announce our latest addition to ControlMonkey’s CI/CD solution – Control Policies! Control Policies provide customers with preventive controls to help them avoid errors and misconfigurations in production, making it an essential tool for DevOps teams.

With Control Policies, DevOps teams receive instant feedback for any proposed infrastructure configuration changes before they are deployed to their live environment. DevOps members get immediate input on any misconfigurations or non-compliant changes as part of their CI (Continuous Integration) pipeline, enabling them to take corrective action quickly and efficiently. Utilizing this GitOps methodology can save a significant amount of time that would otherwise be spent on reviewing incorrect code among DevOps team members.

ControlMonkey Preventive Controls

By offering preventive controls, ControlMonkey is taking a proactive approach to infrastructure management that can help organizations avoid costly mistakes. Compared to detective controls, which identify issues after they’ve occurred, preventive controls provide an opportunity to avoid those issues altogether. This means that Control Policies can help organizations reduce the risk of errors and misconfigurations in production, which can lead to costly downtime and lost revenue.

ControlMonkey’s Control Policies are cloud-ready, parameterized policies, which means that customers don’t need to use any specific programming language or be familiar with Terraform internals. This is a major advantage for organizations that may not have dedicated DevOps members to write policies on their own.
With Control Policies, customers can provide parameters according to their needs, and ControlMonkey takes care of the rest, including supporting different versions of Terraform and various plugin versions.

Some Examples

To better illustrate the capabilities of Control Policies, let’s explore a few examples of how they can be applied in real-world scenarios:

1. Required Tags:  A customer can define that all of their resources should have specific tag keys and tag values. If a proposed change contains a resource without those tags the build will be blocked on ControlMonkey’s CI solution. This helps maintain consistency and compliance across your infrastructure and simplifies resource management.
2. Allowed Regions:  A customer can define allowed regions in which resources can be spun up. If someone attempts to spin up resources in a different region, they will be blocked. This is highly relevant for GDPR compliance, as it helps organizations manage and maintain data residency requirements by restricting resource allocation to specific geographical locations.

These examples demonstrate the versatility and practicality of ControlMonkey’s Control Policies in addressing common infrastructure management challenges. By implementing such preventive controls, organizations can streamline their DevOps processes, save time, reduce risks, and enhance overall efficiency.

Overall, Control Policies are an essential feature that can help organizations manage their infrastructure delivery more efficiently and with fewer errors. If you’re looking for a reliable and efficient platform to manage your infrastructure, check out the ControlMonkey CI/CD pipeline with Control Policies today! 

ControlMonkey now supports Azure DevOps Git repositories as a version control system vendor.
This integration allows customers to manage their Terraform code on Azure DevOps while leveraging the ControlMonkey platform to set up a CI/CD pipeline to automate the process of building and deploying infrastructure on AWS using Terraform code.

In addition to Azure DevOps, ControlMonkey also supports GitHub, and GitLab as version control system vendors. These tools are widely used in the industry and offer a range of features for automating the software development process.

By supporting multiple tools, ControlMonkey gives customers the flexibility to choose the best solution for their needs. Azure DevOps is a cloud-based platform that provides tools and services for collaborative software development, including source control, work tracking, and continuous integration and deployment.