From SOCI Compliance to Continuous Infrastructure: How Puppet Helps Protect Critical Infrastructure

Australia’s critical infrastructure landscape has changed significantly. The Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 (SOCI Act) has evolved from a framework focused primarily on identifying critical assets and reporting incidents into a broader risk-management and operational-resilience regime. 

The 2024 reforms reinforced that direction, increasing the focus on the systems, data, and technology dependencies that underpin Australia’s essential services. For organisations responsible for critical infrastructure, this creates an important question: 

How do you move from documenting security and risk controls to demonstrating that those controls are actually implemented and remain effective as infrastructure changes? 

This is where infrastructure assurance becomes important. And it is where Puppet can play a critical role. 

SOCI is Ultimately About Operational Risk 

The SOCI Act applies to defined critical infrastructure assets across sectors including energy, communications, data storage and processing, financial services and markets, water and sewerage, healthcare, transport, higher education and research, food and grocery, space technology and defence industry. 

Depending on the asset, organisations can face obligations covering areas such as critical infrastructure asset registration, mandatory cyber incident reporting and Critical Infrastructure Risk Management Programs (CIRMPs). 

The framework is deliberately broader than cyber security alone. 

For organisations subject to the CIRMP requirements, the objective is to identify material risks that could affect the availability, integrity, reliability or confidentiality of a critical infrastructure asset and establish appropriate measures to minimise or eliminate those risks. 

The Distinction Matters. 

• A security policy may say that servers must be hardened. 
• A vulnerability-management policy may require critical vulnerabilities to be remediated within a defined period. 
• A configuration standard may specify how operating systems supporting a critical service must be configured. 
• But there is a difference between having the policy and knowing that the infrastructure continuously conforms to it. 
• That gap is an infrastructure assurance problem. 

The 2024 Reforms Make the Technology Dependency Even Clearer 

Australia’s 2024 SOCI reforms further strengthened the relationship between critical infrastructure and the technology supporting it. 

Among the changes was a greater recognition of the importance of systems holding business-critical data associated with critical infrastructure. 

This reflects a simple reality. 

• Critical Infrastructure is increasingly dependent on digital infrastructure. 
• A hospital relies on servers, applications and data platforms. 
• An energy provider depends on interconnected IT and operational systems. 
• A telecommunications provider operates enormous distributed compute and network environments. 
• A financial institution depends on complex hybrid infrastructure spanning data centers, virtual machines, cloud platforms and applications. 

Protecting the critical systems therefore increasingly means protecting, and assuring, the infrastructure underneath it. 

The Problem With Point-in-Time Compliance 

Many organisations already have sophisticated security programs. 

• They have vulnerability scanners. 
• They have SIEM platforms. 
• They have endpoint security. 
• They have configuration standards. 
• They have security frameworks and audit processes. 

These technologies are extremely good at answering questions such as: where are we exposed? 

But identifying an exposure is only the beginning. 

The next questions are harder: 

• Has it been remediated? 
• Was it remediated everywhere? 
• Can we verify the remediation worked? 
• Has anything changed since? 
• Can we prove that the required control remains in place? 

Traditional point-in-time compliance models struggle with this because infrastructure is constantly changing. 

• Administrators make changes. 
• Applications are updated.  
• Servers are rebuilt. 
• New cloud workloads appear. 
• Configuration drift occurs. 
• New vulnerabilities are discovered. 
• A system that was compliant yesterday may not be compliant today. 
• For critical infrastructure, that creates a potentially significant assurance gap. 

Moving from Compliance to Continuous Assurance

A More Resilient Model Looks Like This: 

Discover > Assess > Prioritise > Remediate > Verify > Continuously Assurance 

Security tools can discover vulnerabilities and assess exposure. Risk and vulnerability-management platforms can help organisations prioritise what matters. The challenge then becomes turning those findings into action across potentially thousands of infrastructure components. 

This is Where Puppet’s Desired-State Model Becomes Particularly Relevant. 

Instead of simply executing a configuration change once, Puppet allows organisations to define how infrastructure should be configured and continuously maintain that desired state. 

If a configuration changes unexpectedly, Puppet can identify the drift and bring the system back into alignment with the defined policy. 

The result is a shift from: 

“We configured this system securely” 

to 

“We continuously maintain this system in its required secure state.” 

Turn Security Policy Into Enforceable Infrastructure Policy 

Security requirements are often expressed as policies, standards and frameworks. 

The operational challenge is implementing them consistently across infrastructure. 

Puppet’s policy as code approach allows infrastructure requirements to be defined as executable desired state. 

Puppet Security Compliance Enforcement extends this approach with pre-built policy-as-code aligned to recognised security standards including CIS benchmarks and DISA STIGs. 

Rather than relying entirely on teams to manually translate security standards into configuration scripts, organisations can automate the enforcement of hardened configurations across supported Windows and Linux infrastructure. 

For SOCI-Regulated Organisations, This Can Help Bridge an Important Gap: 

Governance Policy > Technical Control > Operational Enforcement 

Detect and Remediate Configuration Drift 

Infrastructure does not remain static. 

A server may initially be deployed in accordance with an approved security baseline, but changes made days or months later can move it away from that state. This is configuration drift. 

Puppet continuously evaluates managed infrastructure against its defined desired state. When drift occurs, Puppet can identify the difference and automatically restore the required configuration. That changes the security model from periodic checking to continuous control. 

For critical infrastructure operators, the objective is not simply to demonstrate that a security control existed during the last audit. The more important question is whether that control is operating now. 

Accelerate Vulnerability Remediation 

Vulnerability management presents a similar challenge. Finding vulnerabilities is rarely the biggest problem. Remediating them at scale often is. 

Security scanners can generate thousands of findings across large infrastructure estates. Those findings then need to be prioritised, passed to infrastructure teams, remediated, validated and closed. 

Puppet Enterprise Advanced can ingest vulnerability information from security scanners, including an out-of-the-box integration with Nessus, and connect those findings with remediation workflows. Teams can identify affected systems, prioritise vulnerabilities, execute remediation and validate the resulting state. This helps close one of the most persistent gaps between security and infrastructure operations: 

Detection > Remediation 

And it creates an opportunity to reduce the time that known infrastructure vulnerabilities remain exposed. 

Continuously Enforce Secure Configurations 

Remediation is only useful if the problem stays fixed. This is where desired-state configuration management becomes particularly powerful. 

Once an approved infrastructure configuration has been defined, Puppet can continuously enforce it across the managed estate. 

Assess > Identify deviation > Remediate > Verify > Continuously enforce 

If a system subsequently drifts from the approved configuration, Puppet can detect and correct that divergence again. 

For organisations managing critical infrastructure, this provides an operational mechanism for maintaining controls rather than relying exclusively on periodic assessment. 

Produce Evidence as Part of Operations 

There is another important dimension to infrastructure assurance: evidence. Risk teams, security teams, executives, auditors and regulators increasingly need to understand not simply what an organisation intended to do, but what actually happened. 

Puppet’s configuration-management model produces operational records showing enforcement activity and changes across managed infrastructure. 

That creates a valuable by-product: Evidence of control execution. 

Instead of manually reconstructing whether a particular configuration was applied across hundreds or thousands of systems, organisations can use system-generated information to support their assurance and audit processes. 

For SOCI and CIRMP stakeholders, this can help connect the governance layer with operational reality underneath it. 

A shared control plane between security and infrastructure teams 

This also addresses an organisational problem. 

• Security teams frequently identify risk. 
• Infrastructure teams frequently own remediation. 
• Risk and compliance teams need evidence. 
• Executives ultimately own the consequences. 
• Without an effective operational model, those groups can become disconnected. 
• A vulnerability scanner identifies a problem. 
• Security creates a ticket. 
• Infrastructure receives the ticket. 
• Someone writes a script. 
• The change is deployed. 
• Another scan eventually determines whether it worked.  
• Evidence is assembled later for an audit. 
• At scale, this model creates friction and delay. 

Infrastructure assurance creates a tighter feedback loop: 

Security identifies risk > Policy defines required state > Puppet enforces that state > Infrastructure is continuously evaluated > Drift or exposure is remediated > Evidence demonstrates what occurred

That makes Puppet more than an infrastructure automation tool. 

It becomes part of the operational control layer connecting security policy with infrastructure state. 

What Puppet Means for SOCI-Regulated Organisations 

Puppet alone does not make an organisation SOCI compliant. Compliance with the SOCI Act depends on the organisation, the critical infrastructure assts it owns or operates, its applicable statutory obligations and the broader risk-management framework it has established. 

Technology is only one component of that framework. 

But technology can determine whether infrastructure controls are merely documented or consistently operationalised. 

For organisation responsible for critical infrastructure, Puppet can help answer increasingly important questions: 

• Do we know what secure state looks like? 
• Can we enforce that state consistently? 
• Can we identify when infrastructure moves away from it? 
• Can we remediate known exposure quickly? 
• Can we verify that remediation occurred? 
• Can we demonstrate that those controls remain in place? 

These are not simply compliance questions but questions about operational resilience. They'll take you from infrastructure automation to infrastructure assurance.

The Evolution of Australia’s Critical Infrastructure Regulation Reflects a Broader Shift in Cyber Security. 

Knowing that a vulnerability exists is no longer enough. Having a security policy is no longer enough. Passing an annual compliance assessment is no longer enough. 

Organisations increasingly need to know that the infrastructure supporting their most important services is operating in the intended secure state, continuously. 

That requires a closed loop: 

• Identify exposure. 
• Remediate it. 
• Verify the remediation. 
• Maintain the required state. 
• Produce evidence. 

Puppet’s desired-state architecture, continuous compliance capabilities, vulnerability remediation and policy as code approach can provide the infrastructure enforcement layer behind that model. 

For Australia’s critical infrastructure operators, that represents an opportunity to move beyond point-in-time compliance towards something more valuable. 

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