Hey, intelligent teams, you're well aware of how important DevSecOps is, it's a great goal. But, for various organizations, DevSecOps is no less than DevStopOps as the app development teams are running at a rapid pace to bring business-critical apps to users. making it more and more difficult for the security teams to figure out security and compliance gaps. The actual reason here is that the right, automated security policy is the missing element. In today's time of agility, various CEOs and security experts have spoken about security challenges, and CISOs face these challenges on a regular basis. A growing number of connected devices, lack of security skills, highly fragmented networks, and more are the common challenges. And, the biggest of all is thinking that security is a business blocker, it's a business enabler instead.

Where is the problem?

The process followed is where all the problems get started. It is a common process for app development to keep security at the end of the process. App designers design the app, develop it, and later, they think about all the security issues that they can come across. When we talk about the right coding process, security needs to be treated as an integral part of the process. The fact is, it's not only about the development process, if implementing the right security tools and segmentation takes a week, it is also a major issue in the security policy process.

 

Automation is the way to win

If you want to fill the gap between security and agility, then automation is the way to win. Many businesses may already be using automation as an element of security but lack the visibility to create the right security policies. So, what's the first step that needs to be taken? Security teams must take inventory of the existing security policy, compare it with the current compliance requirements, and create a solid security policy that can be implemented across applications, devices, and networks. With the help of the right policy, security teams can easily figure out compliance and security issues. Needless to mention, teams also need to take quick actions to find who can get what kinds of access and application. The goal here is to automate the process so that the teams can make quick decisions. In today's time where network complexities have increased business attacks, manual security processes don't work anymore.

Know the importance of working together

This particular point has been raised by experts, it is highly important to work together. Security decision-makers across industries and smart people have raised the point that there is a need to constantly collaborate and bring the best solutions into the market.

Of course, there are countless solutions available in the market that are trying to grab the attention of CISOs, these solutions are in an integrated fashion, all of them promising to bring the best outcomes for their customers.

 

Choosing the right automation tool for network security policy

Here, let's take a look at what research has to say. 50% of the companies with 1000 or more employees use more than 20 cybersecurity tools, which adversely affects the ability of a business to manage and secure its network.

Today, businesses are expected to meet the growing number of compliance, legal, and regulatory requirements, for security teams, a complex network makes meeting these requirements a time-consuming process. These challenges become more complex when an organization is utilizing various cybersecurity tools. All without compromising with agility, network security policy automation can help in dealing with these kinds of complexities.

How does security policy automation help?

When businesses are in a rapidly changing IT environment, attacks are growing rapidly. In this case, only balancing security and agility is something that's not enough. A business needs to improve both these areas without making any compromises. Corporate networks will continue to grow and there will be some complexities to manage, and this is where security policy automation can prove to be helpful.

How to choose the right policy automation for your business?

A few things that you need to keep in mind while choosing the network policy for your business include:

Network topology awareness

One of the most important components of any network security policy, network topology awareness needs to be on top of the priority list. Also, it is important to ensure that the tool must be able to understand your hybrid and complex network. If you want to make things automated in the right way, then this is an important point to consider. If your automation works only 50% of the time, then you can't trust the solution. If you want to ensure quick and very precise provisioning of new or changed access policies, then you can do this only with the help of accurate topology path calculations and policy analysis. The tool that you choose must be capable of delivering more accurate network security data and this is when you will be able to achieve it.

Security policy generation and management should be automated

For measuring the quality of security in any business, security policy works as a ruler. In the absence of the right security policy, it becomes very difficult to measure the level of security that is already in place in the business. Though thinking about the violations of your security policy in production is something you can do later. When the right practices are implemented, they encourage businesses to move in the right direction, security policy helps in bringing a change, the changes that are compliant and secure.

When it comes to security policy creation, there are countless challenges that a business many need to face. Some of the businesses don't even have a central repository where all these policies can be stored and updated, some admins completely rely on spreadsheets or institutional knowledge that they have. These policies are needed to be changed as per the changes taking place in the business.

In the absence of generic corporate policy, businesses don't have a policy on which they can rely or begin to create their own policy. The fact is, not all the policies and business needs are same, this is the reason why it can take months for a business to create and implement these policies. It becomes a lot more challenging when you are trying to apply consistent segmentation policies, all across the mix of security solutions.

When you are trying to find the best policy automation solution for your business, make sure that the options that you are choosing should help you in automatically generating and maintaining accurate security policy across the hybrid environment, it needs to be the one that can be made an integral part of your change process. It's completely fine if your business has no solid policy before the automation process, the thing is your solution must be able to resolve this issue.

Scaling ability

Most of the businesses today are making use of hybrid network using IaaS and PaaS, needless to mention all the adoption of container-based development practices. This takes us to the third, and very important point, the tool must have the ability to scale. In the near future, the network and cloud environment may not be the same. The policy automation tool must be capable of expanding as per the growing needs of business.