Compliance: The Heartbeat of DevOps. How IT Outposts Approaches Compliance

DevOps is all about compliance from start to finish. The first area of compliance is, of course, the data. The second area is the tools that we use for our DevOps processes. IT Outposts takes care to only use properly licensed, approved tools from trusted vendors. No shady or sketchy tools developed on someone's home computer. 

A key part of DevOps compliance is monitoring and auditing. Our team uses various tools to keep track of what developers, ops teams, client support, and anyone with access are doing in environments. If someone tries to access AWS, for example, we have monitoring that alerts us to any suspicious activity. Even if they don't actually have access to resources, our team gets alerted if they try. 

When we have clients in highly regulated industries like finance, or that have to comply with GDPR or other data privacy policies, we take the time to thoroughly read and understand these policies. We then ensure our DevOps processes, infrastructure, and all other areas we're responsible for are fully compliant with the client's requirements. Properly handling sensitive data is crucial.

In fintech, specifically, using a VPN is often a compliance requirement. Developers and ops can't just connect directly from their home network. They have to connect through an approved corporate VPN first to access internal resources. And even once on the VPN, they still have limited access, with additional passwords and restrictions for highly sensitive systems.

On a recent e-commerce project, we helped the client achieve Amazon certification, which was entirely a compliance exercise. This client has customers providing credit card data to pay for subscriptions. IT Outposts had to ensure there was absolutely no way for that customer data to ever leave secure internal systems. Only those directly working on processing payments had ANY access whatsoever to that data. Amazon even required that we have a process to securely wipe former employees' machines before reassigning them.

So, if a client has specific compliance needs above and beyond typical requirements, we adapt our procedures to meet those needs. Customers can count on IT Outposts to go above and beyond to keep their data and systems fully compliant at all times through comprehensive DevOps practices. Compliance is in the DevOps DNA.