Building one secure cloud environment is relatively straightforward. But what happens when you need to secure a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand environments and manage thousands of passwords, certificates, keys, and credentials? How about doing it across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud?
And how do you get this all ready for the currently-happening AI revolution? You need to redefine your infrastructure, security policies, and everything else in your cloud estate as code.
This blog dives into why you want to take this approach and looks at how you start doing that.
For a deeper dive into this topic and a live demo of an “as code” approach to enhancing cloud security, watch our on-demand webinar Secrets management and access as code with Vault and Terraform
»Security at scale: The reality of employee ratios
If your security posture depends on someone remembering to do the right thing in a console, you’re already doomed.
Sure, engineers need to understand security, but they can’t memorize and manually implement every security policy on each piece of code they write without errors. The pressure to move fast is too strong. So they’ll introduce security holes.
Filing tickets and waiting for your security team might help, but that process breaks down at scale too.
The average ratio of developers to platform engineers to security professionals is (at best) around 100:10:1 according to DORA. (some companies like SIXT have a 20:1 Dev:Platform ratio)
Expecting one security person to keep up with the needs of 100 developers, without effective tools and a good workflow in place, is a tall order. That’s why automation through codification is the only way to make that math work.
While there are many approaches to automation, we promote codification. Codification allows for knowledge to be executed by machines, but still readable by operators. Automated tooling allows operators to increase their productivity, move quicker, and reduce human error. Machines can automatically detect, triage and resolve issues.— The Tao of HashiCorp
»The 4 layers of codification
From a conceptual standpoint, think of each cloud or hybrid environment as a bounded workspace with its own resources, identities, and processes where a team can build and run something.
Within each environment, security touches four key areas that can be codified:
- Infrastructure: What runs the workload and how it’s configured
- Applications: What you deploy, what’s inside images, what gets patched
- Networking: How things communicate, what’s reachable
- Security: Secrets, identity, encryption, monitoring, controls
There’s also a fifth layer, but that can’t be codified: People. They determine how work happens, how changes are made, and how access is granted.
Each area is a potential attack surface, but they all share one backbone: infrastructure. Infrastructure choices are security choices. Pipeline failures and inconsistencies become vulnerabilities. And network segmentation and reachability issues jeopardize your foundational risk and blast radius controls.
Security as code needs to start with infrastructure as code and then moves into policy as code.
»Everything as code: Automating the infrastructure and security lifecycle
Going back to the idea of ‘one security person trying to keep up with the needs of 100 developers manually’ — the way you change that story from manual futility to automated happiness (and massive risk reduction) is by automating your policy as code. By automating the enforcement of various policies and standards, you maintain security, resilience, and budgetary limits in your cloud environments.
Security as code falls under the concept of “everything as code” and it includes:
- Infrastructure as code
- Policy as code
- Access controls as code
- Network connectivity rules as code
- Developer workflow abstraction and bundling as code
- Any type of configuration as code
Here’s a look at codification through the lens of the
»Infrastructure
Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the practice of defining and managing cloud infrastructure — networks, compute, storage, databases, and access policies — through machine-readable configuration files, typically using Terraform.
IaC is used to:
- Describe the desired state of an environment in code
- Store it in version control
- Programmatically compare that desired state to what exists today
- Generate a change plan
- Apply updates through cloud provider APIs
This makes infrastructure repeatable and easier to govern while also reducing configuration drift that occurs when people make one-off manual changes outside of standard protocols.
For organizations operating in the cloud, IaC brings speed and consistency without sacrificing control:
- Reliability improvements by standardizing environments
- Stronger security by baking guardrails into reusable templates
- Broad compliance through auditable, reviewable change histories
In practice, IaC shifts cloud operations toward an application-development-style model where infrastructure changes follow disciplined workflows (reviews, testing, staged rollouts) and scale across teams and regions with far less risk.
»Applications
Applications run in machine images. But manual builds can be wildly different, creating potential vulnerabilities.
To address this risk, use an image automation tool like Packer that lets teams build identical “golden” machine images from pre-tested source templates. The benefit is faster, more reliable provisioning and patching. New servers start from a known-good baseline, which reduces configuration drift, improves security consistency, and makes compliance and incident recovery easier because environments are reproducible.
»Networking
Securing cloud environments requires a clear definition of “who can talk to whom.” Terraform can again be used here to automate network middleware systems such as Palo Alto Networks, F5, Fortinet, Cisco, etc. You can also use Terraform with a service networking platform like Consul to help applications find and talk to each other reliably and securely across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
At its core, Consul provides a registry of what services exist and where they are, health checking (so traffic is routed only to healthy instances), and an API/DNS interface applications and tools can query. It also includes a built-in key/value store often used for lightweight service configuration or metadata, and it can be extended into a service mesh capability for secure, encrypted service-to-service communication.
Consul reduces the operational pain of dynamic cloud environments and boosts security by supporting identity-based, encrypted connectivity and explicit “who can talk to whom” policies (intentions), resulting in stronger governance for distributed architectures.
»Security
Compromised credentials are one of the top causes of security breaches, making secrets management one of the most critical components of cloud security.
»Secrets management
Vault is an identity-based secrets and encryption management system that centralizes how organizations store, control access to, and use sensitive data like:
- API keys
- Passwords
- Certificates, and
- Encryption keys, and more
Applications and users authenticate to Vault, Vault authorizes access via policies, and then it can either return static or short-lived secrets, or perform cryptographic operations on the caller’s behalf.
Vault reduces breach risk and operational friction by:
- Removing hard-coded secrets
- Enforcing least-privilege access
- Providing auditable control over who accessed what
It also supports dynamic, time-limited secrets (like on-demand database credentials) that can be automatically revoked when they expire. The result is stronger security posture, better compliance and auditability, and faster, safer cloud operations because secrets and encryption are managed consistently across teams and environments.
»Secure remote access
Managing access to cloud environments is another critical security requirement. A secure remote access platform (a modern version of PAM) such as Boundary provides secure, least-privilege access to infrastructure like virtual machines, Kubernetes services, and databases.
The basic process looks like this:
- Users authenticate with trusted identity providers.
- Boundary authorizes them to specific “targets” in a passwordless workflow.
- Boundary brokers the connection through workers that act as network proxies.
This creates a direct, session-based path to the resource instead of exposing whole networks like many VPNs do.
Boundary reduces risk and operational friction by enabling just-in-time, identity-based access with clear policies and centralized management across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It improves auditability through:
- Detailed access logs
- Session recording
Both support compliance and incident investigation.
The net benefit is tighter security (smaller attack surface, less standing privilege), simpler access operations for engineers and vendors, and more consistent governance even as your infrastructure becomes more dynamic.
»The people layer
None of these “as code” automations will be as effective if they’re all scattered rather than combined in a unified platform strategy.
Your overarching goal should be to build an internal developer platform that improves productivity and prevents “workarounds” that can lead to security problems.
HCP Waypoint is a developer-focused “application delivery” layer that standardizes the build → deploy → release lifecycle through a single workflow definition. It acts as a thin orchestration plane that abstracts differences across target runtimes (for example, Kubernetes, virtual machines, or managed platforms) using a plugin model, so teams can define repeatable delivery patterns once and apply them consistently across environments.
This enables a more consistent golden path for delivery with:
- Fewer bespoke CI/CD scripts
- Reduced deployment variance between teams
- Clearer separation of responsibilities between platform engineering and application teams
The result is:
- Faster lead time to production
- Lower change-failure risk through standardized release practices
- Improved governance because delivery workflows are codified, reviewable, and reusable
»Take the next step
When everything is expressed as code, you can:
- Get a system of record for security-relevant change.
- Produce audit reports without heroics.
- Run analysis and tests before changes land.
- Standardize safely without freezing innovation.
For a deeper dive into this topic and a live demo of an “as code” approach to enhancing cloud security, watch our on-demand webinar: Secrets management and access as code with Vault and Terraform.
