DEV Community: iSmileTechnologies

CIO Guide for Operational and Business Benefits of DevOps

iSmileTechnologies — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 16:26:20 +0000

The rising demands of end-users have forced businesses to face many challenges to increase their operational efficiency and productivity. Also, the continuous evolution in the market plays a handy part in pressuring businesses to achieve optimal results.

To overcome and eliminate all those hassles, businesses can prefer a DevOps culture that brings collaborative work nature to their team. This blog is about briefing DevOps and its benefits (Operational & Business) for an organization.

What Is DevOps?

DevOps brings rapid growth or development to an organization with a set of approaches and practices. In simple words, DevOps can be defined as a tool that enhances the development and operational capabilities of an organization.

It enforces a collaborative workforce and brings cultural changes to improve business values. Though DevOps brings more benefits to an organization, still it will differ according to the organizational workflow and structure.

Why DevOps Is Important to An Organization?

Today’s market evolves upon user behavior and trends consistently. To handle those changes and to bring more operational values, the implementation of DevOps becomes essential for an organization.

Here are the lists of reasons that make DevOps essential

Builds collaboration among teams
Offers continuous test environment
Enhance operational capabilities to manage quicker deployments
Bring the ability to monitor the performance
Increases business ROI

However, the benefits offered by DevOps can be classified into 3 types, technical benefits, Operational Benefits, and Business benefits. The upcoming sections will elaborate on the operational and business benefits an organization can achieve through the implementation of DevOps.

_Operational Benefits of DevOps
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The ultimate goal of DevOps is to bring more efficiency, cost-effectiveness along with scalability features to an organization. Businesses that depend more on their frontend operation can avail more benefits through DevOps. Apart from bringing more stability to the business, DevOps allows business stakeholders to sync their business operations with their business goals.

By doing so, every employee knows their goal and will work to achieve it. Take a look over those operational benefits of DevOps in brief.

Get Free Cloud ROI Assesment Workshop

iSmileTechnologies — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 19:32:51 +0000

Assessing the ROI of private cloud and PaaS is more complex and often unclear, thus measuring the impact of Cloud ROI is an important step for an organisation to optimize its cloud investment.

When it comes to cloud migration, CIO’s would like to assess cloud migration cost vs on-premises infrastructure cost as per their digital transformation road-map and operational continuity of their organization.

In this 60-minute workshop, you will get :

An analysis of your existing workload and applications for cloud migration and current cost structures.
Detailed assessment report with recommendations with an assessment report to help you to decide your Cloud ROI and readiness.
Cloud Readiness Assessment for your business by understanding your business case for cloud movement.
Compliance & Operating Process.
Operational costs optimization.

Schedule here: https://www.ismiletechnologies.com/cloud-roi-assessment-workshop/

Here’s How to Create a Successful DataOps Framework for Your Business

iSmileTechnologies — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 11:03:48 +0000

Most of you have heard the term DevOps, which refers to a popular practice where development and operations teams work together to deliver applications faster. It’s time we bring that same notion to the data world with DataOps so that we can achieve agile data mastering:

Agile Data Mastering (n): A modern Data Management technique to rapidly and repeatedly unlock value from a wide variety of data sources by combining highly automated, scalable, cross-domain data unification technologies with a rapid, iterative, collaborative process.

In order to put a DataOps framework into place, you need to structure your organization around three key components: technology, organization, and process. Let’s explore each component in detail to understand how to set your business up for long-term data mastering success.

An organization’s technology is comprised of two main elements: architecture and infrastructure.

Architecture: Technology architecture is the set of tools that comprise your data supply chain. This is how you oversee and execute your entire data mastering process. To follow the DataOps framework, your technology architecture must be comprised of the following principles:

Cloud First: Companies are opting to start new data mastering projects natively on the cloud which significantly reduces project times and are designed to easily scale out as needed.

Highly Automated: Automating your data infrastructure is essential to keep up with the rapidly expanding scope and volatility of dataops sources, as the manual or rules-based approaches to data modeling and management are impossible to build and maintain economically.

Open/Best-of-Breed: Using a combination of platforms allows you to have the best-of-breed for each component of your infrastructure. Never be married to one piece of software and always keep up to speed with new technology and platform options. It’s a bit more work in the beginning than choosing an end-to-end solution from a single vendor, but the ability to mix and match–and most importantly replace–components as your data landscape evolves is a huge dividend.

**Loosely Coupled (Restful Interfaces Table(s) In/Table(s) Out): **Tools should be designed to exchange data in tabular format over RESTful interfaces. This avoids dependency upon proprietary data formats, simplifies the development of data applications, and aligns with how consumers intuitively interact with data.

Tracking Data Lineage/Provenance: Having a clear lineage to the origin of your data makes it far easier to debug issues within data pipelines and to explain to internal and external audiences where the answers to their analytics questions actually came from.

Bi-Directional Feedback: A major problem many organizations face is having the right infrastructure in place to collect valuable feedback from data consumers they can then prioritize and address. Systematic collection and remediation of data issues – essentially a Jira for data – should replace the emails and hallway conversations that never make their way back to corrections in the sources.

Process Data in Both Batch and Streaming Modes: The ability to simultaneously process dataops from source to consumption in both batch and streaming modes is essential to long-term data ecosystem success as data arrive with varying frequencies and applications have different requirements for data refreshes.

Integrate Security Into the SDLC

iSmileTechnologies — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 10:18:51 +0000

Open Source Vulnerability Scanning

Most software projects contain thousands of external dependencies. Many of these are open source components which could contain security vulnerabilities, may have been created without security best practices, or which may have potential licensing issues once incorporated into a project.

Open source vulnerability scanning – also known as software composition analysis (SCA) – analyzes open source components, libraries, and their dependencies present in the analyzed codebase. Any detected open source artifacts are identified by their version, distribution, source, common platform enumeration (CPE), and other distinguishing characteristics.

1. Scanning in development: Developers can automatically be notified of security issues in components they are including. They can then make faster, informed decisions on how to address or avoid introducing these risks.

2. Scanning in security testing:** Any component with vulnerabilities that exceed a predefined risk threshold should raise an alert and be inspected before deployment to production. These alerts can trigger remediation activities from development teams or be reviewed and prioritized by security teams.

3. Scanning in production and pre-production:** Any new vulnerabilities or risks that enter the application after security review can be detected, alerted upon, and addressed. This includes risks from artifacts that entered the project through means other than the SDLC or CI/CD pipeline, zero-day vulnerabilities, and malware.

Benefits of DevSecOps Managed Services

Increased collaboration between all teams - development, security, and operations
Threat Modeling & Architecture reviews help eliminate security threats and Vulnerabilities at an early stage in the lifecycle
Achieve greater agility and speed while designing a future-proof system for scaling
Opportunities for quality assurance testing and automated builds wherever possible
Automatic inbuilt Security of Code
Continuous Security Enablement at all stages in the lifecycle
Extensive experience with most modern security implementation tools like Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, and Datadog

Getting Started with Compliance as Code

iSmileTechnologies — Fri, 12 Aug 2022 13:30:20 +0000

Another area where the shift-left trend is well-established is Compliance with regulations and self-imposed obligations. Your team may produce a secure, low-risk Code faster by integrating Compliance into your workflow and using Compliance as a code approach. On the road to production, Compliance as code techniques ensures that the proper regulatory or corporate compliance standards are completed without human intervention. It incorporates Compliance into both operations and development.

By defining how resources must be configured, Compliance with code technologies gives stakeholders the ability to guarantee that production processes are compliant. These solutions can frequently automatically adapt resources into a compliant state to satisfy these pre-established compliance standards thanks to such a framework.

For large businesses, especially those subject to complicated legislation, this kind of minimal-friction Compliance is an essential solution (such as enterprises operating in healthcare or financial services). Compliance can be incorporated into the DevOps lifecycle to improve workflow and save developers valuable review and testing time.

How do you put Compliance into practice?

Management, Compliance, internal audit, PMO, and infosec leaders must come together to define Compliance as code policies at the outset. Together, they will create the rules and manage the workflows. Throughout the pipeline, management must know how operational hazards and other risks will be managed.

How your team is organized will affect how your firm establishes Compliance with code regulations, but transparency is necessary regardless of how your teams work together. Consider implementing the following rules to make sure information is shared, and choices are taken jointly:

Peer reviews: The first review cycle for bigger changes should be manual to ensure no modifications are made without at least one other person checking the change. To guarantee the quality of the review, reviewers can be allocated at random.

Static application security testing: In addition to human reviews, every code update should undergo static (or white box) testing.

Review by subject-matter specialists for high-risk Code: Changes should be reviewed by a subject matter expert for Code that the management team identifies as high-risk (such as security code).

Regulated access restrictions: Management must maintain access controls to prevent modifications from being made by a single engineer and to ensure that each change is processed via the workflow and is accessible to anybody with access to the dashboard.

The Function of Compliance as a Code

People typically create compliance rules with a non-technical background in brief, simple language that is simple to understand. Still, for it to function, the rules must be converted from the non-technical format to Code. Compliance as a Code means that the developer must transform the requirements and rules into machine-readable Code. This conversion's primary goal is to separate compliance standards' definition, application, and enforcement from the Code.

Examining the Code and any new changes are carried out with Compliance as Code tools, which cause the proper actions to be triggered whenever a change occurs. Tools monitor code changes and application modifications to ensure that nothing new compromises the Compliance of the regulations. OPA is one of the most well-liked and effective compliance solutions available today (Open Policy Agent).

Why is Compliance with the Code required?

The biggest advantage of adhering to the Code is that you can create tests instead of configuration. You can be more specific when developing tests than writing or authoring Code.

Here are four reasons why firms require Compliance with a code:

CI/CD pipeline and Compliance as a code

Greater visibility of the various rules evaluated at each stage of the software development life cycle is made possible with compliance-as-code aid. The security team can better assess the risks when compliance-as-code techniques like shift-left security are used early in the software development lifecycle. Additionally, early adjustments made by the development team can result in on-time delivery, cut cycle time, and enable both teams to work more quickly.

A compliance audit trail and Code

Using Compliance-as-a-Service to validate and audit compliance Code, which relies on programmatic techniques, aids in achieving a very high degree of precision. Scalability is also easier even in cloud environments; when Compliance depends on manual processes, the results may be too error-prone because humans tend to make mistakes. The provided programmatic techniques can be scaled up to fit the environment and verify compliance status if the environment is scaled up. Thus, it is relatively simple to create process repeatability, which lowers the overall effort needed to deploy and maintain compliant workloads.

The gap in Compliance Knowledge

Compliance-as-code made it a mandate to include controls and compliance standards in various business operations. It aids in closing the knowledge gap in Compliance. Prioritizing the compliance activities is also beneficial. For illustration, suppose one of your automatic reports provides a list of 20 non-compliant programs. As a result, you can quickly order them according to how urgently your company needs them. Additionally, it simplifies the routine reporting process and aids in achieving transparency over the entire compliance process so that management can monitor it easily.

Agile with Compliance as the standard

When using compliance-as-code, all of the checks are automated, and the compliance rules are written as Code. Therefore, you may rapidly rerun your compliance checks to confirm the compliance status following minor adjustments. Additionally, it offers programmatically defined automatic evidence gathering, which simplifies audit planning and evaluation. The ability to test, version, and group compliance rules into bundles, known as compliance bundles, is one of the major benefits of having compliance rules written as a Code. To improve the visibility of the compliance status, compliance infractions can also be gathered, presented, and reported to a central dashboard.

Conclusion

Management, Compliance, internal audit, development, and implementation are all brought by Compliance as a code. All interested parties must collaborate to define the compliance and control policies and rules. Managers must be aware of the procedures for managing operational risks and other pipeline hazards. Possibility of incorporating their specifications into the Code so that their organizations can access those artifacts on their teams at scale and, ultimately, allow Compliance to be another quality assurance component in the software you deliver. It is wise to regularly check on the systems' Compliance and to show external or internal auditors proof of this check-up.