Puppet and compliance - Not just for enforcing policy, but for keeping you in the loop too
As a CIO or security officer, you always look for ways to streamline compliance and improve security. Puppet can help you do both. Puppet is a tool that allows you to automate the deployment and day-to-day management of your IT infrastructure. It’s simple to use and can be easily integrated into your existing workflow. Not only does Puppet make it easy to keep your systems up-to-date and compliant with corporate policy, but it can also help you avoid costly mistakes and outages. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how Puppet can ensure compliance of your systems. And when it is unable to guarantee compliance, notify you.
CIS Benchmarks and Puppet
To maintain compliance with corporate policy or industry regulations, you must implement controls that govern how your system is used and operated. Organizations worldwide use CIS benchmarks to improve their security posture and compliance with industry regulations. They are developed through a consensus-based process that brings together experts from various industries. As a result, they are some of the most trusted and widely used security benchmark guides available.
Puppet is an open-source configuration management tool that can be used to automate the implementation of security controls across an organization’s entire infrastructure. Puppet enables you to define desired configuration states and then apply those configurations consistently across your environment—reducing manual errors and ensuring compliance with best practices guidelines.
Puppet has a library of modules that implement some of the available CIS benchmarks. There are modules for implementing the CIS benchmarks for:
These modules allow you to ensure CIS compliance across a large part of your IT infrastructure with only a little effort.
Puppet Enables Continuous Security Monitoring
Although Puppet keeps track of deviations from the policy, the main philosophy of Puppet is to fix them rather than only reporting them. In most situations, this is a big plus, but sometimes, the impact of “just fixing it” is too big, and you just want Puppet to report it.
[Our modules]/shop/) have special mechanisms to implement this. They are called validation types. We have validation types available for:
- General validation
- Oracle database validation
- Postgres database validation
- IBM DB2 database validation
Using these validations, Puppet continuously monitors your system so you can detect issues early and prevent them from becoming critical problems. By constantly monitoring your system, Puppet can help you avoid costly outages caused by software vulnerabilities or configuration errors. In addition, Puppet’s built-in reporting features give you visibility into what changes have been made to your system, who made those changes, and when they were made. This information can be invaluable when trying to troubleshoot an issue or track down the source of a security breach.
Summary
Puppet is an essential tool for compliance and security officers. It automates compliance insurance and for those situations where a compliance breach is too hard to be fixed by Puppet, the validation types can ensure the right people in the organization get notified. If you’re looking for a way to improve your organization’s compliance and security posture, look no further than Puppet and the puppet CIS modules.
If you could use a hand, we are here to help. Helping our customers get CIS compliant systems is what we do. Do you think you could need some assistance? Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@enterprisemodules.com or by phone: +31 (0)653 847 326 for some consultancy.
About us
Enterprise Modules is the leading developer of enterprise-ready puppet modules for Oracle databases,Oracle WebLogic, and IBM MQ or DB2 software. Our puppet modules help sysadmins and DBAs to automate the installation, configuration, and management of their databases and application server systems. These modules allow them to make managed, consistent, repeatable, and fast changes to their infrastructure and automatically enforce the consistency.
For more information, please visit our website: www.enterprisemodules.com or contact us at info@enterprisemodules.com.