Change Controls Launch Week

This is the first post in our Launch Week series. Stay tuned for more feature announcements that we’ll be sharing over the course of this week!

Check out all of our latest Launch Week Blogs: Day 2 Approvals, Day 3 Drift Detection, Day 4 Break Glass.

Today, we are introducing Change Controls. This set of features — which includes Approvals, Drift Detection, and Break Glass Actions — will help software vendors securely update applications that are deployed into customer accounts.

We’re excited to be introducing features that significantly enhance the security of your BYOC-deployed app. BYOC isn’t secure by default, but with Change Controls, both the vendor and the customer can have peace of mind that there are additional guardrails protecting their software.

Nuon's Zero Trust Model

Nuon is designed around a zero-trust access model. In other words, there’s no need for the customer to entrust the vendor with direct access to manage the application. All the customer needs to do is execute a stack to spin up their environment.

When the stack is deployed, Nuon's install runner will automatically start orchestrating the install. The runner acts like a secure agent in the customer's account and is the only thing that can access the customer environment. The customer can add or remove access to the runner, change its permissions, disable it entirely, or shut it out of the network.

Zero Trust Is Not Enough

Zero trust is a great starting point, but it is not enough. Giving the customer permissions and network controls is empowering, but misses the nuance that comes with different types of updates, and doesn’t control the entire lifecycle of software deployed in a customer's account.

To properly create a SaaS that runs in a customer's account, the application, environment, and permissions must all work in unison. That is, you cannot make decisions about whether an update is safe based on pure permissions. In fact, you need to take it a step deeper.

Providing context for changes, giving customers and vendors a way to securely escalate changes, and automatically looking for policy validations and drift are just as important to offering a secure, robust BYOC deployment as a proper permissions model is.

And that's exactly what we have shipped for you all!

Nuon Change Controls

Over the remainder of the week, we will show you three new features we designed that not only help make BYOC software more secure, but give vendors the tools they need to offer SaaS in a customer's account. While a vendor knows their app, and how to secure it ... a customer only knows their environment and how to secure it.

Now, for a sneak peak of everything we are launching this week!

Approvals

Approvals let you preview changes and prevent unwanted changesets from being applied in a customer's install.

Nuon enables you to approve or deny changes to an install before they are applied. Approvals enable both vendors and customers to reject unwanted changes and prevent changes that could have unexpected or unforeseen effects.

Drift Detection

Drift detection monitors for unwanted or unexpected changes in a customer environment that can cause downtime, or might require customer involvement.

Nuon now enables you to to configure drift scans to happen for each part of your app. When enabled, Nuon will automatically check for drift and notify you before changes go out.

Break Glass Actions

During normal maintenance and upgrade modes, reduced permissions are best practice in order to prevent unwanted changes. But what about when disaster strikes and elevated permissions are required to resolve a specific customer issue?

Nuon now enables you to define Break Glass Actions, which let you request elevated permissions from a customer for mitigating and resolving issues.

BYOC Policy Enforcement

Finally, how do you govern your software in each lifecycle, at scale?

Nuon now enables to define policies that will be automatically applied before any change to a customer install. Policies can protect against unwanted changes, reject noncompliant infrastructure configurations, and more.

Conclusion

At Nuon, we believe that keeping everything secure is the hardest part of offering or consuming a BYOC application. Ultimately, for the BYOC model to feel like SaaS, the software needs to be updateable, manageable, and secure by default.

With these primitives, we are expanding the available tools for vendors and customers to more securely run BYOC software.