Today’s software developers are tasked with a lot more than just coding. To keep up with the fast-paced software-driven economy, they need to focus on automation, collaboration, security, distribution, data analysis, and agility to ensure quality builds and get releases to customers quickly and securely. DevOps and security professionals need a centralized system of records that provides visibility across the business.
Software developers build approximately 80% of software applications using open-source code, which opens up a world of opportunity for today’s threat actors. Code package repositories such as npm and RubyGems allow anyone to store or publish packages, and unfortunately that can include packages containing malware. These are known as malicious packages — the malware of the software supply chain. As the name implies, a malicious package is software that is created with malicious intent.
When we began developing CloudCasa, a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, for protecting Kubernetes applications, we looked at the data protection landscape and focused on areas that we could improve upon and give back to the user community. We wanted to provide them with a quick and efficient way in which they could start protecting this infrastructure with minimal effort, overhead, and most importantly minimal cost.
The software bill of materials (SBOM) has become an increasingly important tool for providing much-needed clarity about the components that make up software — both for application security purposes and governmental compliance. Unlike manual spreadsheets, SBOMs standardize everything into a particular format to minimize inconsistencies. There are three primary SBOM formats currently available, which allow companies to easily generate, share, and consume SBOM data.
In 2022, the adoption of infrastructure as code (IaC) soared, with IaC domain specific languages like HCL, Shell and GoLang gaining popularity and momentum across the open source tools ecosystem. In fact, the rise of Policy as Code is the result of a new paradigm blurring the lines between IT, legal and R&D departments – everything as code. But what do developers have to do with compliance and infrastructure provisioning? What does PaC entail, and what types of PaC are there?
