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Why Chef

Chef exists to improve the lives of IT operators through software automation. We help teams collaborate effectively and adopt a DevSecOps approach in order to deliver and maintain infrastructure and applications that are nimble and secure by design.

Chef At A Glance

Class-leading compliance capabilities

Built for heterogeneous infrastructure

Designed for collaboration

Certified audit and remediation content »

Award-winning »

Demonstrated results in mission critical environments »

"Chef Software’s solution is a good fit for customers that want class-leading governance and compliance features."

Read The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2020

IT Infrastructure Is the Backbone of Modern Businesses

Organizations today rely on IT infrastructure and applications to run nearly every aspect of their business.

From large-scale ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) deployments down to the individual mobile applications users download onto their devices, software creates tremendous value. At the same time, the need for software to adapt quickly to changing demands creates new vectors of security and compliance risk.

In a rapidly changing environment, organizations that move quickly while maintaining security and compliance are best placed to realize the promises of technology. However, this requires traditionally siloed IT teams, such as application developers, infrastructure operators and information security professionals, to work together through shared culture and practices commonly called DevSecOps (Development, Security, and Operations).

DevSecOps — Collaboration That Creates a Competitive Edge

DevSecOps brings security into the DevOps culture more fully and intentionally. Despite the best of intentions, security teams use their own tools and languages that have kept them siloed from development and operations teams. This leads to inefficient layers of custom work and duplication that is error prone and results in wasted resources and delays.

Chef helps facilitate a culture of DevSecOps through collaboration enabled by automation. The premise is simple, if an organization's policies and intentions are defined, they can be written in human-readable code and automated, creating two distinct advantages.

First, automation removes error-prone manual processes. By embedding security and compliance checks throughout the delivery lifecycle, software changes are not blocked and slowed down by onerous security gates.

More importantly, with bandwidth freed up from avoiding custom work, teams are able to collaborate on strategic issues rather than 'firefighting' in a rush to get products shipped for a deadline.

We call organizations that achieve this level of high performance Coded Enterprises.

The Coded Enterprise, Powered by Chef

Fast, Secure, Compliant, Automated

Chef's products are engineered to help IT organizations become high performing Coded Enterprises. Chef helps teams achieve three defining features of a Coded Enterprise:

Design For Security and Compliance

Chef's core belief is that security and compliance are foundational to realizing IT opportunities. Chef helps even the world's largest and most heavily regulated organizations automate security and compliance across their estates. By defining security and compliance policies as human-readable code, organizations can ensure that security standards are maintained and easily audited.

Shift Left for Velocity and Collaboration

This approach enables organizations to 'shift left', a term used to describe ensuring security and compliance throughout the development process, not just at the end when it is ready for deployment. This facilitates a secure, compliant, and collaborative approach right from the start, saving teams the inefficiencies of having to rework a project following failed security testing.

Master Complexity In Heterogeneous Environments

Today’s production environments are complex, often for good reasons. Rather than narrowing options, Chef enables organizations to take advantage of any combination of on prem, cloud, hybrid, and air-gapped infrastructure to meet the unique needs of the business.