Continuous Delivery and DevOps in HighlyRegulated Industries: Overcoming Compliance and Security Challenges – IJCT – Volume 6 Issue 5

Adopting DevOps in highly regulated industries presents unique challenges, requiring a balance between agility, compliance, and security. This paper examines strategies for maintaining regulatory adherence while optimizing CI/CD pipelines. It explores automation-driven compliance enforcement, AI-powered audit mechanisms, and secure artifact management to mitigate security risks. Organizations can achieve continuous delivery without compromising regulatory requirements by integrating DevOps with compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. The study highlights best practices, including Infrastructure as Code (IaC), role-based access control, and automated policy enforcement. Future trends in AI-driven security monitoring and compliance automation are also discussed.

Implementing DevOps at an operational level within highly regulated industries demands the strategic coordination of speed against security measures and regulatory requirements. Traditional DevOps stands for fast, automatable development, yet controlled environments need strict security measures along with uninterrupted compliance tracking supported by systematic auditing frameworks to satisfy sector-specific standards. Organizations can achieve regulatory compliance and rapid development speed by implementing automated systems combined with security monitoring based on artificial intelligence and compliance documentation via code. A combination of real- time compliance validation and secure artifact management with immutable audit logs serves as essential strategies for enterprises to detect risks in advance and build better security frameworks. DevSecOps maturity will get enhanced through future developments in zero-trust architecture deployment, AI-driven compliance automation, and predictive threat intelligence. Implementing proactive security practices and compliance integration into CI/CD workflows leads organizations to fulfill regulatory needs and develop more reliable and resilient software. A properly structured DevOps system provides secure software delivery along with scalability and compliance features for changing regulatory standards.

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