Progress Chef Cloud Security improves security and compliance outcomes for customers

Progress released Progress Chef Cloud Security, extending DevSecOps with compliance support for native cloud assets and enabling end-to-end management of all on premise, cloud and native cloud resources.

This new offering is complemented with new capabilities across the Chef portfolio targeting DevOps success in the most demanding and complex enterprise deployments. This release builds on Progress’ commitment to deliver a unified and scalable platform that enables enterprises to accelerate the delivery of secure and compliant application releases in mixed computing environments.

“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 at a rapid pace and organisations look to the cloud, leading organisations 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, organisations can extend their same proven, trusted DevOps approach to easily manage any combination of public, private and hybrid cloud workloads. The new offering provides the following benefits:

• Enables existing skill sets 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 continually scan and automatically detect security configuration issues.
• Coordinate security, development, testing and operations participation makes it easy to shift security checks to the left applying policy checks at every stage of the DevOps pipeline with coded artefacts, automated tests and enterprise control and visibility via Policy as Code approach.
• Bolsters success with the right mix of training, community and DevRel assistance, technical support as well as cloud aligned pricing and licensing.

Achieving compliance success

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

• New data source and host support: As new technologies are adopted; organisations 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, MS SQL, along with host CIS coverage for new RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu Linux distributions and Mac OS Monterey.
• Cloud protection and scale: As organisations turn to the cloud, many of them are forced to contend with multiple public clouds. Progress has expanded CIS benchmark profile coverage for AWS, Azure, and GCP, with customisable pre-built service and resource templates for 100+ cloud resources reducing the security implementation effort while also 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 artefacts 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 organisation I have been involved in. 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 organisations achieve their goal of using 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 are available as part of the Progress Chef 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 combine 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, resilience 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.”