Ansible Security Policy Automation Workshop

Who is this workshop best for?

This workshop is a hands-on introduction to using Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform® for technical professionals responsible for implementing and deploying security policies across their technology domain. An understanding of Ansible terminology and basic hands-on experience writing Ansible playbooks is valuable , and experience using Git and GitHub is necessary.  This workshop is for those who want to understand how to use Ansible and the Ansible Automation Platform to enforce security policies, following practices modeled on the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

Description

Ansible Automation Platform is a simple yet powerful IT automation framework for configuration management and orchestration that can be learned quickly by technology professionals in any domain.  

This workshop will educate attendees on how to use Ansible and the Ansible Automation Platform to fulfill security policy requirements, by applying the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to a common use-case:

• Requiring HTTPS for web servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Requiring TLS encryption for internal communication between web servers and database servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Generating reports showing that the policy is properly deployed
• Monitoring for drift that violates the policy
• Automating correction of any policy violation

When complete, attendees will be able to apply the practices learned in this workshop to a wide variety of security policy requirements in their own environment, across technology domains including Linux, Windows, Networking, Cloud, and more.

Agenda

• Section 0: Introduction and Initial Setup
  • Walkthrough of the lab topology, and initial configuration
• Section 1: IDENTIFY
  • Define the requirements to be implemented according to the security policy
• Section 2: PROTECT
  • Implement and apply the requirements as an Ansible playbook
• Section 3: DETECT
  • Monitor for drift and generate an audit report
• Section 4: RESPOND
  • Explore actions that could be taken when an incident is detected
• Section 5: RECOVER
  • Using Ansible to restore the systems to the known good configuratio