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InfoQ Homepage News XebiaLabs DevOps Platform Provides New Risk and Compliance Capability for Software Releases

XebiaLabs DevOps Platform Provides New Risk and Compliance Capability for Software Releases

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XebiaLabs, a provider of DevOps and continuous delivery software tools, has launched new capabilities for custody, security and compliance risk assessment tracking for software releases via their DevOps Platform. The new capabilities are intended to assist organisations to track application release status information and understand security and compliance risks across multiple different applications, teams, and environments.

XebiaLabs say that when risk assessment, security testing, and compliance checks are not built into the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, releases can fail and cause delays, security vulnerabilities can threaten production, and IT governance violations can result in expensive fines. Derek Langone, CEO of XebiaLabs said:

To effectively manage software delivery at enterprise scale, DevOps teams need a way to accurately manage and report on the chain of custody and other compliance requirements throughout the software delivery pipeline. It's also vital for them to have visibility into the risk of release failures or security issues as early in the release process as possible. That's when development teams can address issues the quickest without impacting the business.

The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform provides visibility of the release chain of custody across the end-to-end CI/CD toolchain, from code to production. Teams can review security and compliance issues and take action to resolve release failure risks, security vulnerabilities, and IT governance violations are early in the software delivery cycle. XebiaLab's chief product officer, Rob Stroud, provides a 'chain of custody' definition:

Chain of custody in software development refers to knowing the status of a release at any given moment: what's in the release, what the components are, how they're configured, who configured them, what gates have been successfully navigated, and which requirement the code derives from. You need to know the chain of custody of every release, so that if you're ever in a situation where you must recreate or provide evidence in a discovery situation, you can be 100% certain that the information is correct. The information must be immutable and must provide the level of detail required to satisfy audit and regulatory requirements.

One of the features in the new release of XebiaLab’s DevOps Platform is "enhanced chain of custody reporting". This offers a deployment dashboard that shows what is being deployed, who is deploying it, and what the deployment status is without a dependency on which deployment tools are being used or what type of environments are being targeted. The environments can be on premise or private, public, or hybrid cloud. Users can see what is deployed where and track deployments back to feature development and delivery, and can drill down into the chain of custody for completed releases in order to identify slow processes, bottlenecks, pain points, and areas for improvement and increased automation. The chain of custody shows which version of each application is deployed to each environment, and tracks it back to which features are part of each application version.

The new release also includes a security risk dashboard for software releases that combines automated risk assessment for software delivery pipelines with security and compliance information from commonly used tools such as Black Duck, Fortify, SonarQube, and Checkmarx. Visualising security risk helps teams shift security and compliance activity left, so they can detect application vulnerabilities earlier and address them during development, before those vulnerabilities make it to production. Automatic trend analysis supports this capability further.

Also available are new 'at-a-glance' compliance overviews that summarise IT governance violations for common standards such as OWASP, PCI 3.2, and CWE/SANS, and present compliance scanning activity and rule violations. Verifying security and compliance checks run for each release potentially accelerates audits and eases the load. The XebiaLabs Deployment dashboard and Security and Compliance dashboard are available now.

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