The future of GRC: Governance as Code

Governance as code is a modern way of managing policies and compliance by treating them as code. Unlike traditional governance, which depended on manual processes and documentation, this approach automates governance tasks to ensure policies are applied consistently across all systems and reduces the risk of human error.

At its core, governance as code means defining policies in code often using a declarative language and automating their enforcement. This approach allows you to define security, compliance, and operational rules once and automatically apply them across all environments. 

Governance as Code is the practice of defining, managing, and enforcing governance policies as executable code. It allows organizations to: 

• Codify compliance rules using structured policy languages 

• Apply policies consistently across cloud environments 

• Integrate governance into deployment pipelines 

• Monitor and audit policy adherence programmatically 

• Core principles include declarativity, immutability, and automation. 

Importance & Advantages of governance as code 

• Consistency and Standardization - With governance as code, the organization can ensure that the policies and rules are applied across the entire infrastructure. This reduces the chance of errors in compliance as everything is enforced automatically.  

• Agility and Scalability - Traditional governance methods are slow and resource-heavy. When governance is automated through code, tasks that once took hours or days, can now be done in minutes. It also means that one can apply governance policies quickly and efficiently as you scale. 

• Compliance and Risk Management - Governance as code makes it easier to track changes, monitor policy compliance and respond to risks. Potential issues can be detected early and steps can be taken to mitigate them before they turn into real problems. 

• Collaboration and Transparency - Governance as code fosters collaboration and transparency. When policies are written in code, they are easier to share and review. This means different teams can work together more effectively ensuring that governance is everyone's responsibility and not just the security or compliance teams’. 

• Continuous Improvement - Because governance policies are treated like any other code, one can iterate on them, use version control to track changes, run automated tests and continuously refine the policies to remain in synchronization with the business needs. 

Key Use Cases in Cloud Environments 

• Budget Enforcement: Automatically restrict deployments exceeding set budget thresholds. 

• Resource Tagging: Enforce mandatory cost-center tags for all provisioned resources. 

• Quota Management: Prevent the creation of resources beyond predefined usage limits. 

• Policy Auditing: Continuously audit cloud environments for policy violations. 

• Deployment Guardrails: Integrate policy checks into CI/CD pipelines to block non-compliant changes. 

Challenges with governance as code  

Implementing governance as code is not without its fair share of challenges, some of which are as listed below: 

• Defining the right policies - Defining the right policies can be tricky. The organization needs to make sure that all the bases are covered - regulatory requirements, security requirements and operational guidelines. This requires collaboration between various teams to get it right. 

• Policy Translation into Code - Translating the policies into code can also be complex, especially if the team does not have the required experience in coding governance rules. One might need to work with multiple programming languages and tools, which can be a learning curve for teams used to more traditional governance models. 

• Need for version control - Managing governance as code means tracking changes, reviewing them and keeping an audit trail. This ensures that previous versions can be rolled back when necessary and that accountability is maintained throughout the process. 

• Testing - Automated tests must be designed to verify that governance policies work as intended across different scenarios. This is essential for catching issues early and preventing the introduction of new problems into the system.  

• CI/CD Pipeline Integration - Integrating governance code into the CI/CD pipeline requires close coordination between development and operations teams to ensure that governance policies are applied consistently without disrupting the workflow. 

• Monitoring and Alerting - Robust monitoring and alerting systems must be in place to catch privacy violations, generate alerts, and provide insights into the overall governance posture. 

How to implement governance as code 

• Defining your governance policies - Implementing governance as code starts with clearly defining your governance policies. This means identifying which rules and constraints you need to enforce, whether it is around security, compliance or operational guidelines. 

• Map the policies to code - Policies need to be mapped into code, with each policy translated into a code artifact, whether in the form of a configuration file, script, or declarative template. Each piece of code should represent a specific governance rule that can be applied automatically. Tools like the Open Policy Agent (OPA), Terraform Sentinel, AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs), Azure Policy & Bicep and Cloud Custodian provide frameworks for coding these policies and controlling their versions. This allows you to track changes, review updates and collaborate with your team. It also makes it easier to roll back to a previous version if something goes wrong. 

• Implement Automated Testing - Automated testing ensures that the governance policies work as expected. These tests should cover different scenarios and edge cases in order to help catching issues before they become problems.  

• Integrate governance code into CI/CD Pipeline - Integration of governance code into CI/CD Pipeline automates the enforcement of governance policies throughout the software development lifecycle. Monitoring and alerting systems should be set up to detect policy violations and send notifications when attention is required. 

Example Scenario of Governance as Code 

Problem: In a traditional setup, security teams manually review cloud resources to check if S3 buckets are encrypted. This is error-prone and time-consuming. 

Solution: The following is a policy as code using OPA that automatically checks (and optionally remediates) unencrypted buckets. 

package s3.encryption 

deny[msg] { 

  some bucket 

  input.buckets[bucket].encryption_enabled == false 

  msg := sprintf("Bucket %s is not encrypted", [bucket]) 

} 

Explanation: This policy checks whether encryption is enabled for every S3 bucket in input.buckets. If encryption_enabled is false, it flags the bucket as non-compliant. 

How Sujosu Technology can help with governance as code 

Governance as code ensures that your policies are applied consistently, automatically and transparently giving you the control and flexibility you need to maintain compliance, security and efficiency across your infrastructure. Managing governance as code can become overwhelming especially as the system grows in complexity.

Sujosu Technology can help you integrate the governance policies directly into your CI/CD pipeline, automating compliance, security and operational checks. The governance policies can be rolled out gradually similar to how we roll out features for any application. This allows you to test governance policies in a controlled environment before applying them to your entire system.