SAMM - Environment Hardening - 2

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Objective: Improve confidence in application operations by hardening the operating environment

Results

 * Granular verification of security characteristics of systems in operations
 * Formal expectations on timelines for infrastructure risk mitigation
 * Stakeholders consistently aware of current operations status of software projects

Add’l Success Metrics

 * >80% of project teams briefed on patch management process in past 12 months
 * >80% of stakeholders aware of current patch status in past 6 months

Add’l Costs

 * Ongoing organization overhead from patch management and monitoring
 * Buildout or license of infrastructure monitoring tools

Add’l Personnel

 * Architects (1-2 days/yr)
 * Developers (1-2 days/yr)
 * Business Owners (1-2 days/yr)
 * Managers (1-2 days/yr)
 * Support/Operators (3-4 days/yr)

A. Establish routine patch management process
Moving to a more formal process than ad hoc application of critical upgrades and patches, an ongoing process should be created in the organization to consistently apply updates to software dependencies in the operating environment.

In the most basic form, the process should aim to make guarantees for time lapse between release and application of security upgrades and patches. To make this process efficient, organizations typically accept high latency on lower priority updates, e.g. maximum of 2 days for critical patches spanning to a maximum of 30 days for low priority patches.

This activity should be primarily conducted by support and operations staff, but routine meetings with development should also be conducted to keep the whole project abreast of past changes and scheduled upgrades.

Additionally, development staff should share a list of third-party components upon which the software project internally depends so that support and operations staff can monitor those as well to cue development teams on when an upgrade is required.

B. Monitor baseline environment configuration status
Given the complexity of monitoring and managing patches alone across the variety of components composing the infrastructure for a software project, automation tools should be utilized to automatically monitor systems for soundness of configuration.

There are both commercial and open-source tools available to provide this type of functionality, so project teams should select a solution based on appropriateness to the organization’s needs. Typical selection criteria includes ease of deployment and customization, applicability to the organization’s platforms and technology stacks, built-in features for change management and alerting, metrics collection and trend tracking etc.

In addition to host and platform checks, monitoring automation should be customized to perform application-specific health checks and configuration verifications. Support and operations personnel should work with architects and developers to determine the optimal amount of monitoring for a given software project.

Ultimately, after a solution is deployed for monitoring the environment’s configuration status, unexpected alerts or configuration changes should be collected and regularly reviewed by project stakeholders as often as weekly but at least once per quarter.