OpsMx Announces Industry’s First Deployment Firewall

OpsMx announced the release of the industry’s first deployment firewall, a new approach to ensuring application security without burdening application developers. With a deployment firewall, only application releases that have passed all of an organization's security checks and operational policies are allowed to be deployed to a production environment. Customers can add a deployment firewall to their existing CI/CD process to support compliance with industry standards such as NIST 800, HIPAA, and PCI. Deployment firewall capabilities are included in OpsMx’s Deploy Shield product.

“A deployment firewall gives organizations a simpler, more effective way to enforce their own software delivery process,” said Gopal Dommety, CEO and founder of OpsMx. “Organizations know what they need to do for application security and release compliance, but are too often stuck with siloed data and scattered teams operating on an honor system. The deployment firewall combines rich data sets and good intentions to make security policies actionable.”

Recent efforts on application security and securing the software supply chain have largely focused on the application development process. Security responsibilities have “shifted left” to development teams. While this is a critical part of end-to-end application security, enforcing security policies and demonstrating compliance is challenging when responsibilities are spread across distributed development teams, each with their preferred toolset and operating model.

The deployment firewall is designed to make the CI/CD process a single, consistent point of control for security across releases coming from multiple development teams. Just as a network firewall blocks “bad actors” from accessing a network, a deployment firewall blocks “bad application releases" from being deployed to production environments. A deployment firewall evaluates a release against a wide range of policies, automating the pre-release checklist, which today is often conducted manually by Operations and SRE teams. Examples include:

OpsMx provides a core set of Deployment firewall rules that customers can extend and customize. Deployment firewall rules can be used to check compliance with specific requirements of industry frameworks, such as NIST 800, PCI, and HIPAA. A “Deployment Simulation” feature allows developers to check their release for compliance before it is time to deploy, minimizing unwanted last minute surprises.

OpsMx has designed its deployment firewall to work with an organization’s existing CI/CD tools and processes. As part of the OpsMx Deploy Shield product, the deployment firewall can be added to existing Jenkins, Argo, and Spinnaker implementations, with support for GitHub Actions and GitLab to follow. For customers who need a secure, modern CD platform, the deployment firewall is also available in OpsMx’s Secure CD solution. The data used by the deployment firewall is collected through integrations with existing DevOps tools – developers can continue to use their preferred tools.

Source: OpsMx media announcement