In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, organisations are increasingly embracing cloud computing to enhance agility, scalability, and innovation. However, this transition often brings about complex challenges, especially in managing security and compliance across diverse cloud environments. Palo Alto Networks offers a comprehensive solution to these challenges through its Prisma Cloud platform, empowering businesses to decentralise IT operations while maintaining robust security measures.
TNL IT has been working with Palo Alto's Prisma Cloud offering to showcase this shift to a decentralised delivery model, where end-to-end governance and enforcement is now achievable. If decentralisation is not your goal, the same principles can help to increase consistency and compliance against design patterns and organisation policies.
As most large enterprises continue to centralise their IT Operations, platform delivery teams are often burdened with a substantial workload. Instead of directing their efforts toward refining the platform, enhancing features, and addressing issues, IT operations teams frequently find themselves bogged down with repetitive tasks such as updating, maintaining, and duplicating configurations to meet additional project requirements.
The transition to the cloud has resulted in a heightened emphasis on automated deployment models. However, for many, the administration of Infrastructure as Code-based deployments necessitates a manual effort to build, maintain, and deploy infrastructure. While this process does reduce misconfigurations, it may not fully reap the projected advantages associated with automated deployments.
A more efficient approach involves setting up systems with the necessary guardrails, enabling developers and project teams to autonomously manage platform capabilities. This decentralised model not only applies during the development phase but also throughout the entire lifecycle of the resource, ensuring continuous logging and monitoring of any configuration changes.
Prisma Cloud is an advanced cloud-native security platform provided by Palo Alto Networks. It empowers organisations by delivering comprehensive visibility, robust security, and stringent compliance across multi-cloud environments.
Prisma Cloud is not just a tool to provide reporting and enforcement, it helps to enable modernised operating models for organisations feeling the burden of competing priorities and mounting backlogs of work.
Decentralisation of IT operations is a strategic shift that distributes decision-making and execution closer to the points of service or value creation. This approach enhances agility, improves response times, and fosters innovation within organisations. Prisma Cloud facilitates decentralisation by enabling teams to securely deploy, manage, and govern cloud resources independently across various cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes.
Utilising a robust delivery framework, supported by real-time shift-left capabilities with Prisma Cloud, both platform engineers and cyber security teams can be assured that resources cannot drift outside of approved design patterns.
Prisma Cloud empowers individual development teams or business units to take ownership of their cloud security posture. Through its CSPM capabilities, teams can identify and remediate misconfigurations, enforce compliance policies, and prevent security threats without relying heavily on centralised security teams. This distributed responsibility ensures that security is ingrained into every stage of the cloud lifecycle, from development to deployment.
Prisma Cloud not only helps delivery and operational teams to meet demands, but it also assists governance teams with shifting to a continual governance risk and compliance framework. Enabling a Continual Authorisation to Operate (CAtO) model enforces design pattern decisions to deployment templates, and live resources. ClickOps can cause a resource to fall out of compliance, this is usually not discovered until a compromise has occurred.
Shift-left is not about transitioning the focus to the deployment stage only, its about embedding the correct configuration and security controls at the creation, and ensuring compliance is maintained.
2. **Continuous Compliance**
Maintaining regulatory compliance across diverse cloud environments can be daunting, especially for organisations operating in highly regulated industries. Prisma Cloud streamlines compliance management by providing real-time visibility into compliance posture, automated remediation of policy violations, and comprehensive audit trails. This decentralised approach empowers individual teams to adhere to industry standards and regulatory requirements autonomously, reducing the burden on centralised compliance teams.
3. **Common Policy Engine**
The concept of a common policy engine in the context of Prisma Cloud is pivotal for creating a consistent and unified security and compliance framework across an organisation’s IT operations. Here’s an expanded look at how this engine functions and the advantages it delivers.
A common policy engine serves as a centralised rule-based system that allows organisations to define, manage, and enforce security and compliance policies uniformly across various cloud environments. This uniformity simplifies policy management by providing a single source of truth for security and compliance rules. The policies set in the common policy engine span across different aspects of the development and deployment process like code repositories, development environments (IDEs), and cloud service configurations.
The common policy engine empowers cross-functional collaboration among platform engineering, development, and SecOps teams.
Palo Alto's Prisma Cloud solution serves as a catalyst for decentralising IT operations in the cloud era. By empowering teams with the tools and capabilities to manage security, compliance, and governance independently, organisations can unlock the full potential of cloud computing while mitigating risks effectively. As businesses continue to embrace digital transformation and adopt cloud-native architectures, Prisma Cloud stands as a trusted partner in navigating the complexities of modern cloud environments while driving innovation and growth.
Contact us to explore how we can help your business achieve the same model and efficiency.
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