Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer Practice Exam

To enable developer teams to deploy applications without a full network and security review, what should the organization mandate?

1. Regular security audits

2. Use of infrastructure as code with static analysis in CI/CD pipelines

3. All developers to complete a security certification

4. Automatic deployment of applications to production

The correct answer is: Use of infrastructure as code with static analysis in CI/CD pipelines

Mandating the use of infrastructure as code with static analysis in CI/CD pipelines is an effective strategy for enabling developer teams to deploy applications while minimizing the need for extensive network and security reviews. This approach integrates automated security checks directly into the development workflow, ensuring that code is examined for vulnerabilities before it’s deployed. By using infrastructure as code, organizations can define their infrastructure in a text format, allowing for greater consistency and reproducibility. This also facilitates version control and can easily be integrated with CI/CD pipelines. Static analysis tools can automatically scan the code for known security issues, compliance with security policies, and best practices. This means that potential vulnerabilities can be identified and addressed early in the development process, significantly reducing the risk associated with application deployments. This proactive approach promotes a shift-left security mindset, where security considerations are incorporated earlier in the development lifecycle, aligning security practices with developer workflows. Hence, teams can deploy applications more confidently and quickly, without the bottleneck of prolonged network and security reviews. The other options, while valuable in their own right, do not provide the same level of direct integration into the development and deployment process. Regular security audits (the first option) are beneficial for assessing overall security posture but may not offer the immediate feedback needed during active development