Kickstart your journey by taking the interactive assessment at DevOps Assessment Tool. This article will guide you through each question, helping you gain deeper insights and make the most of your evaluation in the category: Infrastructure.
Welcome to this expert-level assessment guide focused on Infrastructure within your DevOps, CI/CD, and DevSecOps practices. Infrastructure forms the backbone of your software delivery pipeline, and securing it is critical to maintaining business continuity, compliance, and operational excellence.
This article is designed as a practical self-assessment tool. For each question below, you will select your current maturity level from:
- Not doing
- Novice
- Intermediate
- Advanced
- Expert
- Visionary
Use these questions to identify gaps, prioritize improvements, and benchmark your infrastructure maturity. Each question includes business benefits, how it supports engineering teams, and actionable advice to advance your capabilities. Relevant resources are linked to deepen your understanding and implementation.
1. How comprehensively does your configuration code incorporate automated checks to ensure unnecessary services are disabled, only required ports are open, file permissions are enforced, audit and logging policies are implemented, and development tools are prohibited on production?
Business Benefits: Automating configuration checks reduces security risks from misconfigurations, which are a leading cause of breaches. It ensures compliance with internal policies and external regulations, minimizing costly incidents and downtime.
Engineering Team Benefits: Automated checks provide fast feedback loops, reduce manual errors, and improve consistency across environments. Teams can confidently deploy knowing critical security controls are enforced automatically.
How to Achieve: Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with embedded security policies using tools like Terraform, Ansible, or Chef. Integrate configuration scanning tools such as OpenSCAP or Chef InSpec to validate compliance continuously. Enforce policies that disable unnecessary services, restrict ports, enforce file permissions, and disable dev tools in production.
Learn more about security controls and best practices at the Center for Internet Security Controls.
2. How rigorously are security-approved operating systems, software versions, and frameworks employed to build your infrastructure, including defining security-related controls like Access Control Lists (ACLs) and File Integrity Monitoring (FIM)?
Business Benefits: Using vetted, secure OS and software versions reduces vulnerabilities and the attack surface. ACLs and FIM help detect unauthorized changes, preventing data breaches and ensuring regulatory compliance.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams gain stability and predictability with approved software stacks, reducing firefighting and patching overhead. FIM tools alert teams quickly to suspicious activity, enabling faster incident response.
How to Achieve: Maintain an approved baseline list of OS, software, and frameworks. Use configuration management tools to enforce these baselines. Implement ACLs to restrict access strictly and deploy FIM solutions such as Tripwire or OSSEC to monitor critical files.
Explore guidelines from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for detailed security controls.
3. To what extent is a least-privilege model enforced for processes operating on shared infrastructure?
Business Benefits: Least-privilege minimizes the blast radius of security incidents by ensuring processes and users have only the access they need. This reduces insider threats and limits damage from compromised accounts.
Engineering Team Benefits: Clear access boundaries simplify troubleshooting and auditing. Teams can operate securely without unnecessary privileges that increase risk.
How to Achieve: Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and use tools like Kubernetes RBAC or cloud IAM policies to enforce least privilege. Regularly audit permissions and automate revocation of unused rights.
Further reading on privileged access management is available at the Microsoft.
4. How effectively are smaller clusters utilized to reduce complexity and improve manageability between teams?
Business Benefits: Smaller, well-scoped clusters reduce operational complexity and risk of cascading failures. They enable clearer ownership and faster incident resolution, improving overall system reliability.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams can manage clusters independently, reducing coordination overhead and deployment conflicts. This autonomy accelerates development and deployment cycles.
How to Achieve: Architect your Kubernetes or container orchestration environment into smaller clusters aligned to team boundaries or application domains. Use namespaces and network policies to isolate workloads. Leverage cluster management tools to maintain consistency.
Learn cluster management best practices from the official Kubernetes documentation.
5. How thoroughly are the security controls of service provider partners validated to ensure alignment with business requirements within their domains of the shared security model?
Business Benefits: Validating partner security controls mitigates third-party risk, which is a major source of supply chain attacks and compliance failures. It ensures that partners meet your security standards.
Engineering Team Benefits: Confidence in partner security reduces firefighting and audit burdens. Teams can integrate services faster when security expectations are clear and verified.
How to Achieve: Conduct regular security assessments, audits, and reviews of your service providers. Use frameworks like the Cloud Security Alliance’s STAR program for evaluation. Include security requirements in contracts and SLAs.
Explore partner security validation frameworks at the Cloud Security Alliance.
6. How rigorously are the security controls of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers validated to ensure alignment with business requirements within their domains of the shared security model?
Business Benefits: Ensuring cloud provider controls align with your business requirements reduces risk of data breaches and service disruptions. It clarifies responsibilities in the shared security model and supports compliance.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams gain clarity on what security controls they must implement versus what the provider manages. This helps avoid gaps and overlaps in security coverage.
How to Achieve: Review cloud provider security documentation and certifications regularly. Use shared responsibility models to define control boundaries. Implement continuous monitoring and compliance tools tailored to your cloud environment.
Microsoft Azure’s shared responsibility model is a useful reference: Azure Shared Responsibility.
7. How unified is your infrastructure provisioning process across cloud and on-prem environments using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) standards such as Terraform, Pulumi, or Ansible?
Business Benefits: Unified provisioning reduces errors, accelerates deployments, and ensures consistent security and compliance across hybrid environments.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams can reuse code, collaborate better, and quickly spin up environments that meet security and operational standards.
How to Achieve: Adopt IaC tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or Ansible for all environments. Define reusable modules and templates that enforce security policies. Integrate provisioning into CI/CD pipelines for automated, auditable deployments.
Learn IaC principles and best practices at HashiCorp Resources.
8. How consistently is immutable infrastructure adopted for improving reliability and reducing drift across deployment environments?
Business Benefits: Immutable infrastructure eliminates configuration drift and reduces downtime caused by inconsistent environments, improving reliability and security.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams deploy fresh, tested images rather than patching live systems, simplifying troubleshooting and rollback.
How to Achieve: Build and deploy immutable server images or containers. Use tools like Packer to create images and automate deployments with CI/CD pipelines. Avoid manual changes to running infrastructure.
Martin Fowler’s article on immutable servers is a foundational resource: Immutable Server Concept.
9. How automated and policy-driven is your infrastructure patching and update process for cloud-native, hybrid, and on-prem systems?
Business Benefits: Automated patching reduces vulnerability windows and operational overhead, ensuring systems remain secure and compliant without manual intervention.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams can focus on innovation rather than firefighting vulnerabilities. Automated processes reduce human error and improve auditability.
How to Achieve: Implement patch management tools that support your environment (e.g., Azure Update Management, WSUS, or third-party tools). Define policies for patch approval and deployment windows. Integrate patching into your CI/CD or infrastructure automation pipelines.
Microsoft’s patch management guidance is available here: Azure Patch Management.
10. How resilient is your infrastructure design across availability zones and regions for both single-cloud and multi-cloud strategies?
Business Benefits: Resilient infrastructure ensures high availability and disaster recovery, minimizing downtime and protecting revenue and reputation.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams can deploy with confidence knowing workloads will withstand failures. It simplifies incident response and recovery planning.
How to Achieve: Design for failure by distributing workloads across availability zones and regions. Use load balancers, automated failover, and data replication. For multi-cloud, implement abstraction layers and unified monitoring.
Microsoft Azure’s resiliency architecture guide is a comprehensive resource: Azure Resiliency.
11. How well integrated are your monitoring, alerting, and observability tools across infrastructure layers and cloud/on-prem boundaries?
Business Benefits: Integrated observability enables rapid detection and resolution of issues, reducing downtime and improving customer experience.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams get unified insights into system health, performance, and security, enabling proactive maintenance and faster troubleshooting.
How to Achieve: Deploy observability platforms that support distributed tracing, metrics, and logs across environments. OpenTelemetry is an emerging standard enabling vendor-neutral instrumentation.
Explore OpenTelemetry at OpenTelemetry Documentation.
12. How streamlined is the asset lifecycle management process from provisioning to decommissioning across hybrid infrastructure?
Business Benefits: Effective asset lifecycle management reduces security risks from orphaned or unmanaged assets and optimizes costs by timely decommissioning.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams maintain clear visibility and control over infrastructure assets, reducing shadow IT and compliance risks.
How to Achieve: Implement asset management tools and processes that track provisioning, usage, and decommissioning. Automate lifecycle events when possible and integrate with CMDBs.
IBM’s guide on IT asset lifecycle management offers valuable insights: IBM Asset Lifecycle Management.
13. How aligned are your capacity planning models with real-time usage trends in dynamic environments like Kubernetes or auto-scaling VMs?
Business Benefits: Accurate capacity planning optimizes resource utilization, reducing costs and avoiding performance bottlenecks that impact user experience.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams can proactively scale infrastructure, avoid outages, and plan for growth with confidence.
How to Achieve: Use monitoring and analytics tools to gather real-time usage data. Implement autoscaling policies based on metrics. Continuously refine capacity models using historical trends and predictive analytics.
Google Cloud’s best practices for Kubernetes sizing are a great resource: Right-Sizing Kubernetes Clusters.
14. How efficiently do you manage interconnectivity between on-prem, edge, and cloud networks to ensure low latency and high availability?
Business Benefits: Efficient network interconnectivity supports seamless user experiences and reliable service delivery across distributed environments.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams can deploy hybrid applications with predictable performance and simplified network management.
How to Achieve: Use software-defined networking (SDN), VPNs, and direct cloud interconnects. Implement edge computing strategies to reduce latency. Monitor network performance continuously.
Learn more about edge networking at Akamai Network Edge.
15. How mature is your infrastructure standardization across teams to reduce variance, improve auditability, and accelerate incident response?
Business Benefits: Standardization reduces errors, simplifies compliance, and speeds up recovery from incidents, protecting business continuity.
Engineering Team Benefits: Teams share common tools, processes, and templates, improving collaboration and reducing onboarding time.
How to Achieve: Define and enforce infrastructure standards, templates, and policies. Use IaC to codify standards. Conduct regular audits and incorporate feedback for continuous improvement.
Microsoft’s guidance on standardizing deployments is helpful: Azure Deployment Standardization.
Ready to elevate your infrastructure security maturity and accelerate your DevOps journey? Contact us today for expert guidance, tailored assessments, and actionable roadmaps that transform your software delivery with confidence and security.
