Infrastructure automation specialist Chef Software Inc. today unveiled two new products, Chef Compliance and Chef Desktop, aimed at providing a simplified way of enforcing cybersecurity policies across a company’s systems.

Chef is backed by about $105 million in venture funding and counts more than half the Fortune 500 as users. It’s one of the bigger players in so-called infrastructure-as-code, an ecosystem of tools that enable engineers to automate the configuration of their technology environments with scripts.

Chef’s tools are also used to automate other tasks such as security, which is the main focus of the two newly announced products. The first, Chef Compliance, provides the ability to define a set of security rules that a system should adhere to and then regularly verify that it’s in compliance. The product can perform tasks such as checking if a server is vulnerable to the notorious Meltdown vulnerability or inspecting a Kubernetes deployment to see that its security settings follow industry best practices.

Chef Compliance is a commercial edition of Chef’s open-source InSpec framework, which is used by the likes of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. It adds several capabilities on top of the open-source version’s feature set. Administrators using Chef Compliance can create security rule exceptions for applications that have special requirements, see compliance violations in a dashboard and use automated remediation tools included in the package to fix those violations.

The other new product that made its debut today is Chef Desktop. It allows information technology teams to use Chef’s automation capabilities to secure employee laptop personal computers, desktop PCs and workstations. Administrators can configure security settings such as  hard drive encryption on employee machines and push out operating system patches. The software also provides features for handling more general device administration tasks, including the installation of work applications.

Chef Desktop is launching at a time when countless enterprise employees are working from home. This shift to telecommuting has created new challenges around protecting employee computers from hackers and is driving more spending on cybersecurity products. With Chef Desktop, Chef is  in a better position to go after that opportunity.

The company announced the products at its digital Chef Online event today. It also pulled back the curtains on a new version of its flagship infrastructure and application automation platform, the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack. The update brings improved infrastructure monitoring features as well as an expanded set of tools for managing software packages used in development projects.

Photo: Chef