However, as organizations embrace automation, it’s crucial to ensure modern security measures are in place to protect these new and evolving assets. While other security models control the majority of the narrative across the business landscape, zero trust is quickly emerging as a necessary security implementation concept.

With our recent release of the next-generation architecture for PagerDuty Runbook Automation and PagerDuty Process Automation, we are positioned as the ideal partner to help organizations implement and grow within a zero trust security architecture for the modern enterprise.

To learn more, keep reading and/or register for our webinar about Zero Trust security happening this Thursday, June 15th at 6 A.M. PT and 11 A.M PT respectively.

What is zero trust security?

Zero trust security is a model that challenges the traditional perimeter-based security approach by assuming that no user or device can be inherently trusted—regardless of their location. It emphasizes continuous verification and validation of identities, devices, and network traffic before granting access to resources. It achieves this through multi-factor authentication, granular access controls, encryption, and monitoring, enabling organizations to minimize the risk of data breaches and unauthorized access.

By shifting the traditional perimeter-based security paradigm and adopting a “trust no one” approach, zero trust security offers a holistic framework that aligns seamlessly with modern automation initiatives. Additionally, it can positively impact the process evolution of a business’ inner workings as the world becomes increasingly more complex—and prone to bank-breaking threats.

Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/zero-trust

What’s the big deal?

Zero trust security often stands out as a superior approach compared to traditional security models, largely due to its fundamental shift to a modern technological mindset and comprehensive implementation.

Unlike perimeter-based security models that rely on the assumption that internal networks are inherently trustworthy, zero trust security adopts a “trust no one” philosophy. It implements strict access controls, continuous authentication, and rigorous monitoring at every level, ensuring that every user, device, and network component is treated as potentially untrusted. This approach significantly reduces the attack surface and prevents lateral movement within the network, making it highly effective against both external threats and insider risks.

Additionally, zero trust security provides adaptive access controls that dynamically adjust privileges based on context, bolstering security without impeding productivity. By combining strong authentication, encryption, and segmentation, zero trust security offers a holistic and proactive defense strategy that fortifies organizations against sophisticated threats, making it a superior choice for today’s deep field of dynamic and interconnected digital landscapes.

Business of all sizes can positively benefit from implementing a security model like zero trust, with contributing factors such as:

• Protecting Sensitive Data: Zero trust security ensures that access to this valuable data is strictly controlled and authenticated, reducing the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches, and potential financial and reputational damages.
• Mitigating Insider Threats: Zero trust security addresses the risk of insider threats by assuming that no user or device should be implicitly trusted. This helps organizations identify and address potential risks before they cause harm.
• Adapting to Evolving Cyber Threats: Traditional security models often rely on perimeter-based defenses, assuming that internal network traffic is safe. However, modern cyber threats—such as advanced persistent threats and zero-day exploits—can bypass traditional defenses. Zero trust security takes a more granular approach, implementing continuous auditing, multi-factor authentication, and strict access controls to protect against these evolving threats.
• Supporting Remote and Mobile Workforces: With the rise of remote work and the increasing use of mobile devices, businesses face new challenges in securing their networks and data. Zero trust security allows organizations to implement secure access controls, regardless of the user’s location or device. This flexibility ensures that employees can work remotely while maintaining a strong security posture.
• Meeting Compliance and Regulatory Requirements: Implementing zero-trust security can help organizations meet these requirements by enforcing access controls, monitoring data usage, and demonstrating a proactive approach to cybersecurity.
• Building Customer Trust: In today’s data-driven world, customers value the security and privacy of their personal information. By implementing robust zero-trust security measures, businesses can build trust with their customers, demonstrating their commitment to protecting sensitive data and mitigating cyber risks.

PagerDuty Process Automation + Zero Trust

Digital Transformation initiatives rely on cloud technologies to rapidly scale the business, but there are new challenges around security with automating operations and cloud infrastructure. The main challenge being that engineers need the most secure protocols to run automation in restricted application environments that mandate a zero trust architecture—where direct SSH zone access is deprecated.

Additionally, significant engineering effort is required to deploy and manage automation that performs well across hundreds of remote environments and geographical regions. Lastly, creating resilient automation runbooks is time consuming and prone to error when coordinating within a variety of complex environments.

With PagerDuty Runbook Automation, engineers can now run automation from a central system that triggers the execution through enhanced Runners or AWS SSM within the remote environments—without needing to rely on SSH firewall rules.

PagerDuty Runbook Automation dispatching tasks to remote environments using zero-trust principles.

The new Runners can leverage common plugins like Ansible and Kubernetes and customers can create new types of runbooks where engineers target many remote secure environments and explicitly state where and how tasks will be independently routed and executed within each environment. This enables better performance, scale, and fault tolerance.

For customers with high security requirements, PagerDuty Runbook Automation and Process Automation can now enable connectivity without the need to open ports in their firewalls, such as SSH, enabling remote operations. This new functionality simplifies secure connectivity to automation by reducing the need for customers to deploy their own bastion or jump host and public endpoints.

To learn more about zero trust security and PagerDuty Process Automation, be sure to register for the webinar happening this Thursday, June 15th, at 6 A.M. P.T and 11 A.M. PT respectively.

The post What is Zero Trust Security and Why Should You Care? appeared first on PagerDuty.

Rundeck by PagerDuty has long helped organizations bridge operational silos and automate away IT tasks so teams can focus more time on building and less time putting out fires. And while this mission still rings true today, our vision is to extend this reality and revolutionize all operations while continuing to build trust.

To resolve high-impact work faster and more efficiently, the PagerDuty Operations Cloud delivers value across every IT environment; whether it be pre-production or production, isolated or secure, multi-cloud or on premise—you name it. We want to meet our customers where they are and deliver the value they need.

Starting today, that vision is now a reality. 

We are thrilled to introduce a next-generation architecture for PagerDuty Runbook Automation and PagerDuty Process Automation that simplifies how our customers manage automation across cloud, remote, and hybrid environments.

This latest functionality, among others, is why Runbook Automation is an integral part of the PagerDuty Operations Cloud. Now PagerDuty helps automate across any infrastructure, multi-zoned hybrid environment, network, and more to resolve that unplanned, time-sensitive, and high-impact work we know about all too well.

Standardizing automation across secure infrastructure

It’s clear that automation has become a necessity in order for businesses to keep pace with the rapid transformations happening across the technical landscape. These businesses also have to sustain growth and transformation  while also doing more with the same—or even fewer–resources. Additionally, segregated environments and disparate services add complexity via hybrid cloud realities and increasing security and regulatory requirements. This sprawl of IT environments has led to a new dimension of organizational silos, along with departmental and technical silos. 

One thing is for sure: When built, conventional automation tooling didn’t anticipate the complexity of security requirements in modern distributed environments. As a result, engineers have to manually execute tasks for operations within each environment, causing long wait times, more personnel time consumed, and higher levels of engineering toil. To solve this problem of fragmented automation, something more is needed. Teams need full visibility across their entire infrastructure and the ability to seamlessly execute distributed automation jobs—without having to manually build new automated operations into each project and environment.

With this new functionality, instead of having to manually invoke an automation step in each environment, engineers can now manage and run automated tasks and distribute that automation across their many segregated environments from a single administration.

As a result, teams will be able to: 

• Operate faster by enabling automated operations across cloud and data center environments
• Simplify security when operating in high-compliance and zero-trust architectures
• Eliminate toil by speeding up task resolution and reducing personnel time across all zones, environments, and networks

In order to better understand how this is made possible by the new functionality, let’s touch on some of the challenges we are looking to solve for our current and future customers.

Enabling scale and efficiency with security in mind

While it is true that automation can unlock new levels of scale and potential for innovation, it also brings with it critical challenges around added complexity, connectivity, and security. For technology teams, this means additional dependencies inside isolated environments that need to be maintained, distributed network endpoints to keep in check, and islands of fragmented automation spread across remote and local environments that need to be securely managed and run.

One of the bigger challenges that we hear from our customers is around managing and running automation across environments with high security and compliance requirements. In many cases, engineers have to manually manage each of their several isolated environments due to the many security nuances and process dependencies within each zone.

Now, PagerDuty Runbook Automation can be that connectivity conduit across our customer’s distributed operations that wield strict requirements for:

• Disparate environments? No problem: Runbook Automation and Process Automation can now authorize orchestration of automation steps in remote environments as if they were local, and allows incorporation of many environments in the same job definition. This eliminates network silos that typically compromise automation and thus requires manual log-ins to properly run in those environments.
• Compliance audits? No problem: Runbook Automation and Process Automation now simplify compliance by embedding access control and logging into automation, now extending these capabilities into remote environments—all from a centralized control plane. 
• Zero trust security? No problem: For customers with high security requirements, Runbook Automation and Process Automation can now enable connectivity without the need to open ports in their firewalls, such as SSH, enabling remote operations. This new functionality simplifies secure connectivity to automation by reducing the need for customers to deploy their own bastion or jump host and public endpoints. 

Example diagram of PagerDuty Runbook Automation running an automated diagnostic process in remote environments to capture environmental state.

New Runner functionality

The Runner is a remote execution point purpose built for node steps to run on specified endpoints, rather than from the automation server itself. The Runner, available for both Process Automation and Runbook Automation, securely opens up network/communication between data centers, remote environments, and the automation cluster.  

The new release offers a next-generation Runner that is now integrated with common infrastructure such as Ansible, Docker, and Kubernetes that execute locally within the private network. The new architecture now allows job authors to develop automated jobs that incorporate multiple environments.

New feature highlights

• Run automation anywhere with next-generation Runners that provide secure and resilient connectivity from within remote environments.
• Support complex architectures and jobs with distributed automation steps that enable the orchestration of standardized automation to work across any environment.
• Simplify management with an enhanced Runner UI and APIs that simplify administration of Runners from the central automation environment, including configuration, status, and managing credentials.
• Integrate your existing stack with plugins available on remote Runners for common technologies like Ansible, WinRm, Kubernetes, and Docker that can execute in local and remote environments.

Process Automation and Runbook Automation can now provide the same breadth of automation workflows with execution steps for Ansible or Kubernetes in remote environments that will only continue to strengthen as we blaze this trail of new distributed automation capabilities for our customers. 

Looking ahead

These new automation features from Runbook Automation and Process Automation are just the beginning, and strengthen the value of the PagerDuty Operations Cloud by providing more flexibility for our customers to create triggered workflows across a wider variety of secure environments.

Register for our webinar on Thursday, March 30th to hear more about the latest release from the PagerDuty Process Automation portfolio. If you have any questions or are interested in learning more, make sure to contact your account manager and visit our Process Automation page.

The post PagerDuty Announces New Automation Enhancements That Simplify Operations Across Distributed and Zero Trust Environments appeared first on PagerDuty.