As technology permeates every industry, development teams face mounting complexity balancing innovation, security, and compliance. For organizations in highly regulated sectors like financial services, healthcare, energy, and government, these challenges are exacerbated by strict governance mandates.
TL;DR
Standardizing and automating development environments is key for regulated teams.
The right controls and culture allow compliance and rapid software delivery.
Emerging tech like confidential computing enhances security.
Compliance should empower, not obstruct, innovation when implemented strategically.
However, with careful strategic planning, regulated industries can overcome obstacles and harness the power of agile development. This piece explores best practices and forward-thinking paradigms to help regulated organizations build secure, compliant, and productive development environments.
The Tightening Regulatory Climate
Regulators have significantly expanded scrutiny of software practices as technology underpins mission-critical business functions. Failures like the Equifax breach and Uber data breach prompted agencies like the SEC, FTC, and FDA to sharpen compliance requirements.
New data privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA also impose hefty penalties for violations. Meanwhile, standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and FedRAMP add certification burdens.
This increasingly stringent regulatory climate pressures development teams to implement rigid controls and processes that stifle productivity. However, thoughtfully embracing compliance as an enabler, not an inhibitor, allows organizations to build securely without compromising innovation velocity.
The Challenge of Balancing Innovation and Governance
Legacy development practices in regulated industries prioritized rigorous governance over productivity and innovation. Teams relied on strict change control processes with extensive documentation and review procedures focused on risk avoidance over value delivery.
However, as technology redefines markets and disrupts incumbents, regulated organizations must build software faster and flexibly without sacrificing compliance or security. This requires a mindset shift from viewing governance as an impediment toward recognizing its role in appropriately guiding development.
By implementing targeted controls and automation tailored to specific risks, teams can maintain guardrails without derailing innovation. The right balance empowers developers with the freedom to operate securely within defined boundaries.
Crafting Development Processes for Regulated Environments
Here are several strategies and considerations for optimizing development workflows in regulated industries while fulfilling governance obligations:
Design scaled control planes - Classify data and systems into tiers based on sensitivity. Apply commensurate controls and reviewers for each tier to avoid blanket bureaucracy.
Automate policy enforcement - Tools like Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) solutions can programmatically validate compliance rather than relying solely on human review.
Enable transparency - Capture key data like code provenance, testing artifacts, and approver information to evidence compliance. Make governance metadata visible.
Standardize workflows - Promote reusability by templatizing compliant workflows for common scenarios like releases and infrastructure changes.
Right-size reviews - Focus reviewers on highest-risk changes rather than force full reviews for every commit. Use AI to analyze pull requests.
Promote shared responsibility - Foster a culture where all team members incorporate compliance into their work rather than relying solely on auditors.
Harnessing Cloud without Compromise
Regulated organizations often hesitate to leverage cloud platforms due to data residency, privacy, and export control risks. However, modern cloud capabilities allow tapping benefits like scalability, resilience, and automation while maintaining compliance.
Multicloud and hybrid approaches provide flexibility to deploy regulated workloads in compliant locations and architectures. Technologies like homomorphic encryption, confidential computing, and differential privacy preserve data security in the cloud.
Meanwhile, automation enhances consistency and accuracy by codifying infrastructure-as-code and embedding policy guardrails into provisioning and deployment. Tooling integrations facilitate continuous compliance monitoring and response.
A cloud-smart strategy centered around standards, automation, and data-centric security unlocks cloud capabilities without forfeiting control.
Securing Open Source Usage
Given most modern applications rely extensively on open source libraries, regulated teams must implement oversight without stifling usage. Strategies include:
Strengthen procurement - Formally integrate open source acquisition into vendor processes with license review gates.
Automated scanning - Continuously scan codebases for vulnerabilities, licensing issues, and outdated dependencies.
Standardized reviews - Centralize review of high-risk packages rather than relying on developers.
Restricted lists - Allow engineering teams to easily reference lists of permitted libraries based on prior reviews.
Alternative sourcing - Consider internally building certain components to reduce licensing risk.
Balancing open source agility without compromising compliance involves implementing the above practices incrementally. The goal is gaining visibility and control while keeping developers productive.
Standardizing Development Environments
Regulated organizations need to manage development environments in a standardized and compliant manner. This involves:
Central provisioning - Provide preconfigured development environments through a centralized system to ensure consistency.
Access controls - Manage permissions to create/access environments based on role and project.
Hardened configurations - Standard builds include security measures like minimal OS, encrypted storage, disabled USB, etc.
Immutability - Prevent changes to running environments to maintain a validated state. Rebuild new ones as needed.
Isolation - Segregate environments across projects and classifications with network controls.
Observable workflows - Capture all environment actions for auditing and prevent unauthorized use.
Infrastructure-as-code - Template approved configurations so new environments comply.
Standardizing development environment delivery ensures aligned tools, configurations, and governance across projects while increasing velocity.
Automating Compliance Fundamentals
Automation should be leveraged to embed compliance fundamentals like access controls, configuration management, and change control into development lifecycles. Example focus areas include:
Identity and Access - Consistently manage least privilege and separation of duties for human, application, and machine identities via IAM/PAM solutions.
Infrastructure Compliance - Validate infrastructure like virtual networks and storage against security standards using IaC testing.
Asset Management - Maintain always up-to-date central repositories of environments, data, APIs, tools, and dependencies with automated discovery.
Environment Builds - Construct compliant platforms and pipelines using approved configurations via automated environment factories.
Policy Enforcement - Embed policies for data lifecycles, crypto algorithms, regressions testing, etc. into pipelines and deployments.
Change Control - Track all changes with unique audit trails and enforce gating policies like mandatory code reviews consistently.
Monitoring and Response - Continuously validate controls and configurations against rules, alerting and auto-remediating deviations.
Prioritizing compliance automation ensures organizations stay ahead of evolving regulations, freeing developers to innovate securely.
Fostering a Compliance-Conscious Culture
Balancing governance and productivity ultimately depends on nurturing an organizational culture that views compliance as an enabler rather than a blocker. Tactics for promoting a compliance-conscious culture include:
Celebrate wins - Highlight teams securely delivering high-impact new capabilities to reinforce achievements.
Humanize auditors - Facilitate informal interactions between developers and auditors to build mutual understanding.
Incentivize engagement - Reward teams and individuals for proposing improvements to compliance processes.
Gamify training - Inject fun and friendly competition into required learning programs on security and privacy.
Encourage ownership - Instill a sense of personal accountability in each employee for upholding standards.
Communicate meaning - Connect compliance to broader goals like safety and ethics to give greater purpose.
Fostering an organizational culture centered on shared accountability, learning, and ownership of governance objectives unlocks sustained results and lasting behavioral change.
Conclusion: The Future is Bright
Navigating compliance in regulated industries remains challenging. However, by judiciously combining the strategies outlined in this piece, organizations can overcome obstacles and safely accelerate innovation.
Approaches like policy-as-code, cloud, automation, emerging tech, culture change, and balanced oversight allow regulated teams to retain control without sacrificing productivity.
The future looks promising for regulated industries. With strong foundational practices, strategic adoption of paradigm-shifting innovations, tailored processes, and a culture of shared compliance responsibility, organizations will sustain secure velocity.
By standardizing development environments through centralized Development Environment Management, immutable infrastructure, and infrastructure-as-code, regulated teams can deliver innovation quickly and securely. With the right building blocks in place, compliance truly enables agility.
