A Blueprint for DevSecOps: Accelerating Federal Agencies with IBM and Nirmata
Link⚡ TL;DR
📝 Summary
A Blueprint for DevSecOps: Accelerating Federal Agencies with IBM and Nirmata The Challenge: Navigating a Complex Landscape The Solution: The IBM PDE Factory The Power of Policy as Code A Cultural Shift: From Remediation to Creation In the rapidly evolving world of IT modernization, federal agencies face a unique set of challenges. They must navigate complex security mandates and legacy systems while striving for the agility and speed of modern software development. A recent webinar featuring experts from IBM Federal and Nirmata shed light on this very topic, offering a compelling vision for accelerating DevSecOps and ensuring security is a foundational element, not an afterthought. A poll conducted during the webinar revealed the top hurdles for federal agencies: a tie between manual processes and legacy systems and security and compliance mandates. This perfectly illustrates the central conflict. How do you move fast when everything is a manual, security-audited process? As Mark Wells, DevSecOps and IT Automation Practice Lead for IBM Federal, explained, this was the exact problem that led to the creation of the IBM PTE Factory. Born from the chaos of DevOps engineers “running around like chickens with their heads cut off,” the factory was designed to automate the deployment of infrastructure and development environments. The IBM PDE Factory is an asset—a platform and product engineering tool designed to deliver core services and support for software engineering. It’s built around a “start left” philosophy, meaning security is integrated from the very beginning of the process, not “shifted left” later. The factory’s core is a series of “builders” that automate critical tasks: Resource Builder: Ensures all container images and resources are certified and attested to, with near-zero vulnerabilities, before they are ever used. Platform Builder: Automates the creation of the entire cloud architecture. Security Builder: Deploys pre-configured bundles of security policies.