Quali, the provider of infrastructure automation and management solutions, is unveiling improvements to its end-to-end infrastructure automation and orchestration platform, Torque, revolving around security, risk mitigation for action and policy automation, as well as infrastructure health and efficiency.
In an effort to expand infrastructure understandability, Quali’s updates to Torque optimize value while buckling down on automation security and compliance for organizations that have their own automation already in place. Giving them the ability to decide what and how to control policies within their enterprise, Torque allows its users to exact the specific rules and policies that best suit them.
“Organizations are trying to better navigate the complexity of their infrastructure while realizing greater business value,” said Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali. “The latest release of Torque will help them mitigate security and cloud-cost risks by standardizing and enforcing policies for infrastructure usage, consumption and instantiation, and gain control over associated business processes.”
New automatic security scans and health checks of infrastructure before its deployment aims to guarantee adherence to security postures and compliance policies, ultimately mitigating risk from misconfigurations and alleviating the pressure of manual, complex security management.
“We are investing not just in these features but also in ease of use, and the lightness of them. So, you're not just getting functionality, which is the basic and standard, we want as few clicks as possible for you,” said David Ben Shabat, VP of research and development at Quali. “They can really elevate the capabilities of their organization by creating their own custom workflows and policies and by that, creating very powerful automation, which gives a lot of autonomy to teams, and increases velocity, room for innovation, and releases the bottleneck of those mundane tasks that they need to do.”
Additionally, the enhancements to Torque improve Open Policy Agent (OPA) policy compliance; both auto-discovered and auto-validated, any existing OPA’s are assured adherence within the context of Torque’s requirements. OPA’s can be selected and chosen by administrators for import, including out-of-the-box and existing custom policies. Any policy that fails validation is flagged by Torque.
“If you don't know what policies use Rego or you don't know what OPA is, we have a built-in policy that you can definitely use,” said Ben Shabat. “In two clicks, you can configure a policy for a specific team or a specific environment—the type of policy you want to configure as you see fit.”
Quali’s updates further strengthen OPA-based policy efficacy with automated approvals, allowing users to define rule-based thresholds for automatic approval and denial of deployments. Customize thresholds based on a variety of conditions—such as business needs, users/roles, and teams—through authorization management of who can enforce changes or updates to environments.
Torque now offers infrastructure integration with business workflows by scheduling or linking actions to predefined events, fundamentally improving environment health, infrastructure usability, and business outcomes, according to the company. Users can automate predefined scenarios for underpinning business needs or implement policy-based triggers for automated start up, cost controls, and the shutdown/pause of environments.
“So as of now, policies are being looked at, in different aspects. So first, you have this I would say security policy, like what you can and cannot do, right? But other policies are actually around, such as how you can optimize costs or how you can optimize on efficiency, which translates into what we call workflows,” said Ben Shabat.
“In workflows, we have the capability of selecting an action you would like to do and suggest when you’re going to do that. It’s very easy to set, and those policies run behind the scenes, as well as front center if you need to be alerted on those actions and make sure that you’re in the business context you want,” concluded Ben Shabat.
For more information about Quali’s enhancements to Torque, please visit https://www.quali.com/.