Chef Software Applies IT Automation to Compliance

At the European Chef Community Summit today, Chef Software unveiled a Chef Compliance application designed to make it simpler to track changes and updates to IT infrastructure from a compliance perspective.

Based on technology that Chef gained via the acquisition of VulcanoSec, Justin Arbuckle, chief enterprise architect for Chef Software, says Chef is making use of Chef Compliance software running on top of its Chef Delivery workflow software, which is now generally available, to define policies and keep track of dependencies across an IT environment.

As a byproduct of that effort, Arbuckle adds that Chef Compliance should substantially reduce the amount of time it takes to conduct a compliance audit because all the scripts needed to conduct that audit have already been built in Chef Compliance.

In heavily regulated industries, compliance is often the bane of IT existence. Because of all the rapid changes taking place to the IT environment right now, maintaining compliance with, for example, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) is exceedingly difficult. Arbuckle says that Chef Compliance makes it possible for IT organizations to apply the company’s open source IT automation software for governing the IT infrastructure environment to that compliance challenge.

Despite the widespread awareness of the need for the integration of application development and IT operations (DevOps), adoption of IT automation frameworks remains fairly limited. But given all the pain associated with maintaining compliance, chances are high that more IT organizations will be willing to embrace IT automation if it means less time spent manually documenting changes and updates to systems that are often seen as being at the very pinnacle of IT drudgery.