Meeting the Cloud Challenge While Achieving Compliance Success

Our newest release scheduled for May 25, 2022, our May Mega Launch, will debut the release of Chef Cloud Security, extending DevSecOps with compliance support for native cloud assets and enabling end-to-end management of on-premises, cloud, and native cloud resources. This new offering complements new capabilities across the Chef portfolio, targeting DevOps success in the most demanding and complex enterprise deployments. The upcoming release builds on Progress' commitment to delivering a unified and scalable platform that enables enterprises to accelerate the delivery of secure and compliant application releases in mixed computing environments. Join Progress Chef for a live launch webinar on Wednesday, May 25 at noon ET.

"Worldwide cloud spending will surpass 1.3 trillion by 2025; as businesses pivot to a digital-first economy, cloud will continue to play an even greater, and even dominant, role as the IT industry focuses on delivering greater efficiency, flexibility, and faster innovation," said Jim Mercer, Research Director, DevOps & DevSecOps, IDC. "Chef's product development priorities are focused on improving security and compliance outcomes for customers, creating a unified DevOps approach for application assets, and making the Chef portfolio easier to adopt and use."

Meeting the Cloud Challenge

As technology evolves rapidly and organizations look to the cloud, leading organizations turn to Chef to help manage DevOps, which is complicated by new technologies, diverse deployment landscapes, and never-ending business application requirements. With Chef Cloud Security, organizations can easily extend their same proven, trusted DevOps approach to manage public, private, and hybrid cloud workloads. The new offering provides the following benefits:

• Enables existing skillsets without time-consuming and costly training for managing compliance and security posture for cloud-native technologies, including Containers, Kubernetes, and microservices, ensuring the greatest possible DevOps coverage across entire fleets of assets.
• Supports native-cloud assets for multi-cloud deployment across AWS, Azure, Google, and Alibaba clouds using certified CIS/DISA STIG profiles to scan and automatically detect security configuration issues continually.
• Coordinating security, development, testing, and operations participation makes it easy to shift security checks to the left by applying policy checks at every stage of the DevOps pipeline with coded artifacts, automated tests, enterprise control, and visibility via the Policy as Code approach.

Achieving Compliance Success

Complementing the new Chef Cloud Security offering, Progress continues to invest in InSpec®, the core underlying security and compliance mechanism:

• New Data Source and Host Support: As new technologies are adopted; organizations aspire to use their same DevOps practices to manage new assets. Progress has expanded data protection to include SAP ASE, IBM DB2, Mongo, Cassandra, Oracle, and MS SQL, and host CIS coverage for new RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu Linux distributions, and Mac OS Monterey.
• Cloud Protection and Scale: As organizations turn to the cloud, many are forced to contend with multiple public clouds. Progress has expanded CIS benchmark profile coverage for AWS, Azure, and GCP, with customizable pre-built service and resource templates for 100+ cloud resources reducing the security implementation effort and providing best-in-class scale and performance.
• Ease of Use: Continuing our pursuit to accelerate DevOps journeys, Progress continues to invest in enabling DevOps practitioner success. DevOps professionals now benefit from the automated creation of code, test, and documentation artifacts for new resources, improved visibility into the status and expected completion time for compliance scans, and advanced Shell command support for control and testing without file output.

"Chef has proven to be an incredibly helpful tool within each organization I have been involved. It has reduced system configuration time from weeks and days down to minutes," said Brittany Woods, Server Automation Manager, H&R Block. "On top of that, taking advantage of Chef's policy-based approach makes it easier to empower teams to truly own their infrastructure and release measured changes. With the addition of the new Cloud Security offering, Chef is further extending its value proposition to customers."

Extending 'Infrastructure as Code' to 'Policy as Code'

As a long-time proponent of the collaboration-based 'infrastructure as code,' Chef has applied the same principles to introduce a 'policy as code' for security and compliance. Chef now helps organizations use a single 'as code' framework for their infrastructure, application, desktop, security, and compliance concerns across their entire on-premise, cloud, and edge device inventory. The complete set of Chef capabilities is available as part of the Enterprise Automation Stack™ (EAS), designed for scale to meet the demand of the largest global enterprises, which now includes these new features:

• Combining Configuration and Compliance Processing: Chef now enables DevOps workloads to easily connect infrastructure configuration processing with compliance audits using a single consolidated policy definition. This new feature simplifies the workflow between developers, IT Ops, and Security professionals implementing and running compliance audits while providing a single management and visibility layer—capable of end-to-end processing of configuration updates, state validation and enforcement, data aggregation, and integration for analysis and action triggers using ServiceNow, Splunk, ELK and more.
• Chef "High Availability" (HA): Businesses across many industries rely on Chef products to ensure high uptime and resilience of their critical systems. Chef now supports a HA topology out of the box for higher scalability, stability, and recovery of critical systems. It is available out of the box with enterprise-grade features that meet the flexible demands of scaling and security compliance of underlying infrastructures.

"Over the past several years, Chef—now under the leadership of Progress—has placed significant focus on building out security and compliance capabilities to make the DevSecOps concept achievable for our customers," said Sundar Subramanian, EVP & GM DevSecOps, Progress. "Through a policy-as-code approach, we are extremely excited to see what our customers will accomplish as they aspire to end-to-end DevOps."

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