Automating compliance in software delivery

Staying compliant with regulations and control frameworks is a top priority for developers and IT leaders. Yet navigating comprehensive data security, incident response, and monitoring and reporting requirements can add significant overhead for teams already facing tight deadlines, complex systems, shifting priorities, and intricate software supply chains.

Fortunately, many compliance-related activities can be automated using [continuous integration] and third-party tools, giving you more time to focus on critical tasks. In this article, you will review examples of common compliance frameworks, best practices for achieving compliance as a software delivery organization, and how you can automate compliance with CI/CD.

Examples of software compliance requirements

Various industries require adherence to regulatory standards for software development. These standards have surged in response to the rapid growth of digital technology and the increasing cyber threats that accompany it. While compliance differs from security, it provides a foundational baseline that an organization’s security measures must meet—or ideally, exceed.

For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) specifies privacy and security protections for personally identifiable health information used by healthcare providers and practitioners in the US. Another standard is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS). It provides card transaction guardrails that protect consumer privacy. Specifically, it prohibits storage and unencrypted transmission or processing of personal card details like card verification values (CVVs) and PINs.

For service providers, Service Organization Controls 2 (SOC2) reports are a valuable compliance endorsement that confirms the trust service criteria of the organization’s service delivery processes and controls.

Even governments have compliance requirements before entering into business with contractors. For example, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a certification that government contractors must have to prove that their cloud offering is secure enough to house national data.

In practice, most businesses aim for certification in more than one compliance standard to target markets in different regions and put their clientele at ease. As such, many US-based cloud service providers aim for the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance approval to offer services to EU-based customers.

Software compliance best practices

Adopting compliance best practices is an effective way to demonstrate your organization’s competence and commitment to security. These practices cover areas such as internal corporate governance, risk management, organizational oversight, vendor management, and general security awareness. Common software compliance practices include:

• Enforcing strict access controls and permissions
• Conducting thorough testing and change management
• Scanning for vulnerabilities in the supply chain
• Performing regular compliance audits

The next section explores some of these practices and describes ways your organization can reduce its compliance burden by automating and streamlining your compliance practices.

Access controls, roles, and permissions

Access controls, also known as identity and access management (IAM), is a set of guidelines and procedures for user and infrastructure access. It ensures that you have cordoned off private and proprietary information from unauthorized access and that the blast radius is small in the event of a breach.

Access control begins with authentication, which involves confirming the identity of users before granting access to sensitive data. At a minimum, user authentication involves validating a unique username and password. It can also involve scans of the face, fingerprints, or eyes, or a cryptography certificate. Two-factor authentication, for example, often requires both a username and password combo and a biometric scan.

After authentication, you can implement role-based access control (RBAC) policies. These policies restrict access to information based on the user’s assigned role in the organization. RBAC policies should be based on the principle of least privilege, meaning users should have access to only those resources they need to do their jobs.

Along with RBAC, you can use attribute-based access control (ABAC) to provide granular access based on user or object characteristics, action types, or more. For example, you can use ABAC to implement company policy for stopping work at cutover times or on weekends.

Access, roles, and permissions should be valid for a fixed time and withdrawn on expiration or when no longer in use. This means constant monitoring, which you can automate through scheduled cleanup scans or policy-as-code software such as Open Policy Agent that can evaluate and enforce access policies written in declarative code.

Comprehensive testing

Software testing includes functional and non-functional testing. Functional testing proves that an application works well compared to a set of requirements or specifications. Non-functional testing assesses application behavior at scale, how it contributes to the end-user experience, and how well it adheres to internal and external security requirements.

Even though your software and infrastructure pass functionality, performance, reliability, and security testing, they can still be non-compliant. Non-compliant code is more vulnerable, and could result in a non-compliant status, negatively impact reputation, and attract heavy fines.

Organizations can conduct comprehensive compliance testing to check for application and infrastructure vulnerabilities in user access rights, transmission and storage of personally identifiable information, and program change control procedures. Compliance checks also validate organizations’ documentation and procedures, activity logs, and software licenses.

While many compliance tests can be automated, some organizations require a combination of automated and manual checks. For example:

• An automated functional test confirms that an app’s login feature works.
• Manual non-functional tests confirm that passwords are not visible and are encrypted on the database, as specified in the development code.

Similarly, an automated security test might ensure an application is protected against insecure direct object reference (IDOR). Through manual checks, a compliance test might focus on coding style and confirm the use of universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) when defining user and object models. It might also confirm that:

• The application checks for valid objects and logged-in users before a task is executed.
• URL parameters are obscured.
• Error messages are descriptive but vague enough to prevent correct guesses about software architecture and vulnerabilities.

Supply chain vulnerability scans

To avoid reinventing the wheel, software developers often rely on prebuilt external components, known as dependencies. These dependencies often have their own dependencies, creating a “supply chain” of interconnected software components.

When an organization uses these components, it inherits the entire supply chain, including any risks or vulnerabilities embedded within. This can lead to significant security challenges with far-reaching consequences if not properly managed.

An excellent way to mitigate this risk is to incorporate automated security vulnerability scanning and advisories in your codebase. At a minimum, most security vulnerability scanners can scan for the top 10 Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities are also collated from security bulletins, chatter, and independent research.

Compliance audits

Compliance audits assess how closely your implementation aligns with documented policies and official standards. The audit may start with your codebase, checking for misconfigurations and exposed secrets. From there, the audit typically extends to reviewing your build processes, deployed artifacts, and underlying infrastructure, ensuring every aspect meets the required compliance standards.

For the best chance at passing an audit, ensure that resources are assigned the minimum necessary privileges and access, using proper authentication and role-based controls. These resources should be logically segmented and promptly decommissioned when no longer needed.

Additionally, regularly validate the data storage lifecycle to ensure personally identifiable information (PII) is never stored in plain text—or, ideally, not stored at all.

Finally, robust failover and failback processes should be well-documented and regularly tested to ensure they function as expected under real-world conditions.

You can further guarantee product compliance by auditing the tests you carry out with tools that can provide end-to-end traceability, management, and analysis. Maintain comprehensive logs that capture all system activity, providing the observability needed to simplify system audits and ensure thorough oversight.

Compliance automation with CI/CD

The best way to automate compliance in your software development organization is to implement a comprehensive continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practice. Automated CI/CD pipelines can significantly speed up development while embedding DevSecOps and compliance best practices directly into your workflows, ensuring continuous compliance throughout the development process.

Many CI/CD providers encourage a configuration-as-code approach to defining pipelines. This approach helps teams:

• Standardize their build, test, and deployment practices
• Eliminate misconfiguration errors
• Protect secrets with encrypted environment variables
• Enforce manual approvals before deployment
• Maintain an audit trail of all changes based on version history

Your team can also implement role-based access control policies for CI/CD pipelines along with branch and tag filters that restrict who can make changes to pipeline configuration or trigger a release and under what conditions. Most services also offer comprehensive audit logging that allows organizations to retrieve detailed records of system events for reporting purposes.

In addition to traceability and access control benefits, continuous integration enables teams to incorporate a range of third-party security and vulnerability scanning tools into the build and test stages of their pipelines. You can use CircleCI’s orbs to incorporate popular security and vulnerability scanning tools across all stages of your pipeline, with just a few lines of code.

For example, orbs make it straightforward to integrate SAST and DAST scans for vulnerability and compliance management.

At the build stage of your pipeline, you can use the Snyk orb to run static application security testing (SAST) jobs to detect dependency vulnerabilities, compliance, and license issues.

At the deployment stage, you can run dynamic application security testing (DAST) jobs to catch runtime vulnerabilities in production. Tools like Deepfactor and StackHawk provide prioritized insights into application code, package dependencies, web APIs, and compliance with common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) based on actual app behavior.

For teams in highly regulated industries with stringent data protection requirements, you can opt to install continuous integration tooling on premises behind your firewall for added security. Or, if you prefer the flexibility of a hybrid approach, you can set up self-hosted runners to run specific jobs on private infrastructure. With this option, you can automate redundancy steps such as autoscaling during peak demand or switching to other data centers in the event of a regional outage.

Conclusion

Compliance mandates for software delivery establish the minimum requirements for an organization’s security and business practices. While specific regulations vary across industries, they generally focus on key principles such as least privilege, role-based access control, safeguarding personally identifiable information, thorough testing, and regular audits for observability.

With CI/CD, you can reduce compliance overhead in the development and delivery of software. CircleCI supports compliance best practices like granular role-based permissions, automating security and vulnerability scans, running jobs on private infrastructure, and generating audit logs for system events and pipeline activities. As a SOC-2 certified and FedRAMP-authorized cloud provider, CircleCI gives organizations in highly regulated industries the confidence they need to move quickly while maintaining security and compliance.

To get started automating your compliance practices and eliminating bottlenecks in your development process, sign up for a free CircleCI plan today.