Compliance-as-Code: Automating Governance and Security Controls in Financial and Healthcare Clouds
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63282/3050-9416.IJAIBDCMS-V6I4P109Keywords:
Automating Governance, Security Controls, Clouds, Healthcare, Finance, CaC, IaCAbstract
The growing use of cloud computing within controlled industries like the financial and healthcare sector has necessitated an urgent need of either automated compliance systems that are capable of fulfilling the high-level governance and security standards. The Compliance-as-Code (CaC) is a transformation of regulatory management by digitalizing compliance rules, governance policies, and security control as a machine-readable code, which can be mechanically run and checked in the cloud computing environment. The given paradigm allows organizations to check compliance with the standard as HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and NIST SP 800-53 repeatedly, reducing manual audits and configuration drift. CaC frameworks such as Open Policy Agent (OPA) and HashiCorp Sentinel, Chef InSpec and Cloud Custodian have been integrated with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) pipelines to implement preventive and detective controls on cloud resources [5] -8]. This paper examines the principles of design, technical enablers, and challenges of CaC in financial and healthcare clouds. We discuss policy-as-code languages, automated evidence generation and compliance testing systems as beneficial to achieving an audit ready position, alleviate operational risk and enhance regulatory assurance. In addition, the research has encountered the issues of mapping the legal controls to the technical claims, guaranteeing that the policies are entailed in multi-cloud settings, and the audit traceability. The present results indicate that CaC has proven to provide consistent efficiency and consistency gains but its effective implementation involves a balance between regulatory semantics, governance models, and policy implementing structures [1], [2], [4]. The paper provides a set of recommendations regarding recommendations of scalable, auditable and regulator-defensible CaC adoption on highly regulated cloud settings
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