Announcing HCP Terraform Premium: Enhancing Infrastructure Automation for Enterprises
In a significant development for organizations seeking advanced infrastructure automation solutions, the newly launched HCP Terraform Premium is now generally available. Positioned to expand the capabilities of HCP Terraform, this premium offering comes with robust features that enable enterprises to enhance their infrastructure automation securely and effectively.
The Need for Advanced Infrastructure Solutions
Businesses today are under pressure to optimize their IT investments by simplifying operations, minimizing risks, and reducing costs, all while adhering to strict governance and compliance standards. Recognizing these needs, HCP Terraform Premium is crafted to support enterprises in managing their Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM) on a larger scale. This premium version encompasses features from both the Standard and Plus plans, with additional unique offerings:
- Private VCS Access: This feature provides secure access to private Version Control System (VCS) repositories, ensuring that sensitive source code and static credentials remain shielded from the public internet.
- Private Policy Enforcement: Enterprises can now impose and uphold internal security and compliance policies within their private cloud environments securely.
- Private Run Tasks: Integrating Terraform workflows with internal systems becomes more secure, allowing for a seamless automation pipeline that aligns with an organization’s internal protocols.
- Module Lifecycle Management – Revocation: This allows for the effective management of modules by revoking those that are outdated or vulnerable, streamlining the overall module management process.
Infrastructure Lifecycle Management: A Key to Effective Scaling
Terraform plays a crucial role within HashiCorp’s suite of solutions by providing a strategic approach to Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM). ILM involves managing infrastructure from provisioning to deprecation, acting as a central control plane. HCP Terraform Premium is specifically designed to align with ILM stages, ensuring that organizations can manage their infrastructure consistently, securely, and efficiently.
Consistent Infrastructure Across Environments
Utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows organizations to codify, version, and provision infrastructure across different environments without creating new workflows each time. This consistency is vital for optimizing DevOps operations, which often face challenges due to fragmented workflows across various environments.
Eliminating Public Exposure with Private VCS Access
HCP Terraform Premium allows operations to occur entirely within a customer’s private cloud, significantly minimizing security risks by eliminating the need for public exposure. This security measure ensures that sensitive data and workflows related to Terraform operations are securely controlled, whether in public, private, or hybrid cloud settings. Enterprises with stringent security protocols can benefit from private VCS access, which ensures secure access to private repositories without exposing sensitive data to the public internet, thereby safeguarding valuable intellectual property.
Deploy Policy-Compliant Infrastructure
Organizations must establish guardrails to ensure infrastructure compliance with organizational standards before deployment. This involves implementing "policy as code" to enforce security, compliance, and cost-control conditions. HCP Terraform integrates with a built-in policy engine called Sentinel, allowing teams to automate policy enforcement, ensuring security and compliance.
HCP Terraform Premium enhances this capability by offering robust policy enforcement mechanisms that protect critical services from risks associated with internet exposure. It enables evaluations against private APIs hosted within an organization’s network, maintaining data confidentiality and ensuring compliance.
Integrating Secure Run Tasks
Terraform’s run tasks integrate third-party software actions into certain stages of the HCP Terraform lifecycle, covering aspects like security scanning, cost control, and regulatory compliance. With private run tasks, enterprises can execute tasks from private or self-managed services, ensuring interactions with internal systems remain secure and unexposed to the public internet.
Managing Infrastructure Risks Over Time
Once infrastructure is operational, it requires continuous monitoring, assessment, and remediation to maintain compliance and organizational standards. Managing Terraform operations at scale can be complex and resource-intensive, often necessitating dedicated teams.
HCP Terraform Premium streamlines infrastructure management, allowing organizations to maintain high operational performance without a large operations team. This not only reduces operational costs but also enables teams to focus on core business objectives rather than infrastructure management.
Revoking Outdated Modules for Security
Modules, as building blocks of IaC, are crucial for standardizing cloud infrastructure provisioning. Managing these modules at scale can be challenging, particularly when addressing outdated or vulnerable modules that pose security and compliance risks.
Over time, it becomes necessary to deprecate and replace modules with updated versions. HCP Terraform provides visibility into module usage, facilitates communication with end-users, and incorporates a deprecation process. HCP Terraform Premium further enhances this with module revocation, ensuring only compliant and up-to-date modules are used. Deprecated modules will alert users while allowing ongoing runs, but revocation blocks new runs to prevent the creation of infrastructure with revoked modules.
The Benefits of HCP Terraform Premium
Serving as a central control plane for infrastructure, HCP Terraform Premium offers tangible business benefits, including:
- Simplified Operations: By providing a unified system for both private and public cloud resources, teams gain better risk visibility and streamlined workflows, boosting developer productivity.
- Enhanced Security: Secure connections to private VCS reduce the risk of exposure to cyber threats, safeguarding sensitive code and credentials.
- Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Meeting security and governance requirements without maintaining large infrastructure teams lowers overall costs, enabling organizations to focus on business growth.
Getting Started with HCP Terraform Premium
For organizations eager to scale their Terraform usage securely and effectively, HCP Terraform Premium offers the ideal solution. Interested parties can sign up for HCP Terraform and take advantage of the free trial to explore the full range of features included in the premium offering.
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