What Is Policy Orchestration?

Policy orchestration is becoming increasingly important when it comes to information security. It is a key part of an organization’s strategy for managing security and compliance risks, as well as ensuring that its IT infrastructure is operating securely and efficiently.

At its core, policy orchestration involves the automation and management of security policies across multiple systems, applications, and devices. This can include firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems, identity management systems, and other security tools that are used to protect an organization’s IT environment.

The goal of policy orchestration is to provide a centralized platform that enables the organization to define, implement, and enforce security policies consistently and efficiently. This is particularly important in large and complex IT environments, where manual policy enforcement can be time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to manage.

A policy orchestration platform typically provides a range of features that support the creation and management of security policies. This can include risk analysis, compliance reporting, and event correlation and analysis, as well as automated enforcement and remediation.

For example, a policy orchestration platform might enable an organization to define a set of security policies that apply to all of its cloud-based applications. These policies might include rules that restrict access to sensitive data or that require multi-factor authentication for certain types of users.

Once these policies have been defined, the policy orchestration platform can automatically enforce them across all of the organization’s cloud-based applications, ensuring that the policies are being followed consistently and efficiently. The platform might also provide alerts and notifications when policy violations are detected, or when security incidents occur.

Overall, policy orchestration is a critical process for organizations that want to manage their security and compliance risks effectively. By automating policy enforcement and providing centralized policy management and reporting, policy orchestration platforms can help organizations reduce the risk of security breaches, ensure compliance with regulations and standards, and respond quickly and effectively to security incidents.

What Capabilities Do Policy Orchestration Solutions Have?

As organizations continue to embrace digital transformation and migrate to the cloud, managing security policies and configurations across different domains and resources becomes an increasingly complex and challenging task. This is where policy orchestration solutions come into play, providing a centralized management approach that helps organizations manage and control their policies from a single location.

The first key capability of policy orchestration solutions is the provision of a single point of control, enabling organizations to: 

• Consolidate policy consoles and unify policy management across different domains and resources. 
• Create, manage, and control policies with ease and confidence, while also enjoying robust auditing capabilities.
• Gain a bird’s-eye view of the security and configuration policies, making it possible for administrators to take quick actions when necessary.

The second key capability of policy orchestration solutions is the ability to extend processes to non-Windows resources, such as Linux and UNIX. This functionality helps organizations: 

• Unify their Microsoft and Linux environment and manage Linux security policies. 
• Join Linux servers to their Active Directory domain, enhancing their visibility and control of Linux servers within their Active Directory environment.

The third essential capability of policy orchestration solutions is change intelligence and analysis, which: 

• Captures detailed change information from a wide variety of resources and provides real-time monitoring of critical files, systems, and applications. 
• Detects unauthorized changes that could lead to a security breach and provides the necessary information to take quick action. This capability is crucial in preventing cybersecurity threats and ensuring the overall security of an organization’s resources. 
•  Reduces native Active Directory permissions and extends capabilities to Line of Business (LOB) administrators. 

With the integration of native administration tools, workflow-enabled change management, and detailed reporting of resource across the enterprise, policy orchestration solutions offer a robust and comprehensive approach to Active Directory policy management. 

The solution enforces directory policies both on and off cloud, provides rollback capabilities, and enforces workflow approval prior to committing changes. This allows LOB administrators to perform Active Directory tasks with reduced risk and greater efficiency.

Policy orchestration solutions are essential for organizations looking to simplify and streamline policy management across different domains and resources. With the provision of a single point of control, extension of processes to non-windows resources, change intelligence and analysis, and reduction of native Active Directory permissions, policy orchestration solutions provide a comprehensive approach to policy management, enabling organizations to ensure the overall security and efficiency of their IT environment.

How Does Policy Orchestration Work? What is the Process?

Policy orchestration involves assessing, protecting, and detecting policies and procedures within an organization.

Assess
Identifying and evaluating the individuals who have access to or can change GPOs, including their level of access, admin privilege, duration of access, and other needs.

Protect
Protecting and remediating potential threats that extend outside of the organization’s environment by documenting, testing, validating, and deploying policies. 

Detect
Observe all GPO configuration changes—monitoring granular level changes in real-time, seamlessly creating audit logs and reports, and ensuring that proper approval and testing processes are in place. 

What Business Value Does Policy Orchestration Provide?

Policy orchestration solutions provide significant business value to organizations, including: 

1. Improved security and compliance: Policy orchestration solutions can help organizations ensure that their security policies are consistently and accurately enforced, reducing the risk of security vulnerabilities. This can help them achieve compliance with regulatory requirements and avoid costly fines and other penalties.
2. Increased efficiency: By automating policy management processes, policy orchestration solutions can help organizations save time and money. This can free up resources to focus on other business-critical tasks and improve efficiency across the organization. 
3. Faster response to security threats: With new security threats constantly emerging, organizations need to be able to respond quickly to protect their systems and data. Policy orchestration solutions can help organizations respond faster by enabling them to quickly update their security policies and automatically implement them across their systems and applications.
4. Reduced risk of human error: Policy orchestration solutions can help eliminate the risk of human error in policy management processes. By automating policy enforcement, organizations can ensure that policies are consistently and accurately enforced, reducing the risk of security vulnerabilities.
5. Improved visibility and control: Policy orchestration solutions provide organizations with a centralized view of their security policies and enable them to manage policies from a single location. This can provide them with greater visibility and control over their security policies, making it easier to monitor compliance and enforce policies consistently across their systems and applications.
6. Better collaboration and delegation: Policy orchestration solutions can help organizations improve collaboration and delegation by enabling different teams to manage policies for different systems and applications. This can help them avoid bottlenecks and ensure that policies are managed efficiently across the organization

As demonstrated above, policy orchestration solutions can provide significant business value for organizations, helping them improve security and compliance, increase efficiency, respond faster to security threats, reduce the risk of human error, improve visibility and control, and improve collaboration and delegation.

What Criteria Should Organizations Consider When Selecting Policy Orchestration Solutions?

Selecting the right policy orchestration solution is crucial for organizations to ensure that their security policies are consistently enforced and aligned with their business goals. Here are some additional factors that organizations should consider when selecting a policy orchestration solution:

• Automation Capabilities: The solution should provide comprehensive capabilities to automate policy implementation, management, and reporting processes. Automated policy enforcement helps organizations minimize the risk of human error and enforce their security policies consistently.
• Compliance: The solution should aid compliance with regulatory requirements such as GDPR, HIPPA, PCI DSS, and others. Compliance is critical for organizations to avoid penalties and reputational damage, especially those operating in highly regulated industries.
• Reporting and Analytics: The solution should provide advanced reporting and analytics capabilities to help organizations track their security policy compliance, identify policy violations, and assess their security posture. These features provide organizations with visibility into their security policy implementation and help them make informed decisions. 
• Integration with DevOps and Cloud Environments: Organizations should consider solutions that integrate with their DevOps and cloud environments. DevOps and cloud environments have unique security requirements, so an orchestration solution that can integrate with these environments can help organizations align their security policies with their overall IT strategy. 
• Cost-Effectiveness: The solution should provide a cost-effective way to manage and automate security policies. Organizations should evaluate the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the solution, including implementation, maintenance, and licensing costs.
• Scalability and Performance: The solution should be scalable and perform well, regardless of the size of the organization. Scalability ensures that the solution can adapt to the organization’s changing security needs and provide consistent policy enforcement.
• Security and Reliability: The solution should have robust security features such as encryption, access controls, and audit logs to ensure the security of the organization’s policy management data. Additionally, the solution should be reliable and available, with high uptime guarantees and failover capabilities.

In conclusion, selecting the right policy orchestration solution is critical in order for organizations to align their security policies with their business goals, ensure consistent policy enforcement, and minimize the risk of security incidents.