Governance and Compliance for DevOps at Scale

By Silvia Davis, Senior Product Marketing Manager

I remember my days delivering software implementations to finance and healthcare organizations, where I had to ensure that every step of the application change was digitally recorded for compliance purposes.

One specific case was when I implemented a change management system in a Blood Center Organization. I learned at that time how crucial the application changes were since they had very restrictive regulations to manage the traceability from the blood collection through the patient that would benefit from it.

Technology changes daily, making it hard to keep governance when industry regulations increase.

DevOps brings a wealth of benefits in the pursuit of faster innovation and improved agility. But if the industry’s regulations are not addressed, potential consequences can arise. Enterprises using DevOps must be extra vigilant to reduce risks resulting from ungoverned deployments, especially when done continuously by multiple development teams. While this could lead to operational issues if not taken seriously, non-compliance can result in business financial losses. The key is striking a balance: use DevOps efficiently without sacrificing control or regulatory compliance expectations.

Implementing a Software Chain of Custody is the way to ensure traceability in every step of the software delivery process for organizations that are under restrictive industry regulations.

What is the Software Chain of Custody

A Software Chain of Custody provides evidence of everything that happens in your software delivery process. Just as the logistics chain of custody documents a product’s path through the supply chain to the consumer, the Software Chain of Custody proves what happened, when, where, and who made it happen in your software delivery.

Without this information, meeting audit and compliance requirements as you develop and deliver software at scale is impossible.

How to Implement Software Chain of Custody

1. Integrate your DevOps toolchain and collect data from the various tools for consistency and data readiness.
2. Automate the manual processes to deliver applications, which will help automate the auditing report creation.
3. Have a single pane of glass with complete visibility into your software delivery lifecycle, so you can know what happened with every application at any time.
4. Continuously monitor and improve your Software Chain of Custody process.

What is Required to Implement Software Chain of Custody

A DevOps platform that integrates, automates, and gives you complete visibility, so you can collect the data, visualize, report, and prove it.

What are the Benefits?

It helps you optimize resources by automating the process to generate compliance and auditing reports. DevOps teams sacrifice thousands of hours a year to meet audit requirements and create reports, digging through log files and manually piecing together data that may be incomplete.

It gives you the flexibility to produce reports fast, so the audit, security, and finance groups can get the data they need to prove and meet industry regulations.

It helps you reduce costs of re-work and non-compliance fines.

Push the Button, Get the Report. You’re Done!

With Digital.ai Release & Deploy, customers can harness the power of DevOps to automate manual processes that are prone to errors and have the documentation needed for any audit or industry regulation.

Digital.ai delivers the only end-to-end Software Chain of Custody solution that gives you 100% visibility into your complete software delivery lifecycle, so you can know what happened with every person, every tool, and every process.

“If you’re looking to improve, accelerate, and streamline your end-to-end software delivery, and enforce compliance requirements in a repeatable, auditable process, you want Digital.ai.” Vito Iannuzzelli – Assistant VP of IT, NJM Insurance Group

With real-time visibility and on-demand audit reports showing you what happened to your code, from when it was checked in to when it was released to production, you will:

• Know who approved each release and when
• Know whether all your security and QA tests ran and what the results were
• Know that your business rules and internal processes have been followed
• Know whether you’re releasing software more often and with fewer errors

With our flexible technology supporting broad integrations, you can confidently orchestrate and deliver your applications across different cloud platforms more efficiently and accurately. No more worrying about errors or audits because our product provides the documentation and insights to ensure governance and compliance with industry regulations while giving freedom to developers to deploy securely.

Digital.ai Release and Deploy allows organizations to securely deliver their apps efficiently across multiple cloud platforms with greater peace of mind. And you’ll be able to prove it!

To learn more, read our whitepaper: Building a Software Chain of Custody: A Guide for CTOs, CIOs, and Enterprise DevOps Teams