Resilience Engineering
Shift-left security built for governance
Use DevSecOps methods to stabilise preventive controls at the point of change so engineers move fast within guardrails, governance gets continuous evidence, and leadership can focus on higher-stakes resilience decisions.
- Block insecure states before they reach production
- Reduce surprises and audit disruption through continuous verification
- Keep delivery fast within clear, continuously enforced guardrails
Decisions resilience engineering supports
Engineering teams
- Which guardrails does this change touch, and what is the lowest-resistance path to comply and ship?
- If compliance is not possible, is an exception justified, and under what scope and expiry?
Governance and security functions
- Which preventive controls are consistently effective, and which controls fail often enough to warrant redesign or remediation?
- Where should investment go: improve a control, improve adoption, or accept and manage exceptions?
Executive leadership (CRO, CISO, COO)
- Where should capacity shift from recurring foundational control assurance to higher-stakes resilience and dependency risks?
- Which governance decisions can be taken with confidence because control stability is continuously verified?
Outcomes this capability enables
Prevent drift before production
Validate preventive controls at the point of change, so insecure states are blocked rather than discovered later.
Continuous visibility between cycles
Maintain a continuous view of control posture, so governance relies on current visibility rather than periodic snapshots and manual rebuilds.
Shorten feedback cycles
Provide fast, actionable feedback in delivery workflows, reducing rework and late-stage escalation.
Free capacity for higher-stakes risks
Shift governance effort from recurring control hygiene to strategic resilience risks such as third-party exposure and service continuity decisions.
Understanding Resilience Engineering
DevSecOps methods, applied to stabilise preventive controls so assurance holds between cycles.
How this differs from DevSecOps
The same automation methods are used. The difference is the governance frame: control stability as a prerequisite for credible assurance and resilience decisions.
- DevSecOps optimises for secure delivery and incident reduction
- Resilience Engineering adds control stability and repeatable assurance between cycles
- The question changes from ‘is this secure?’ to ‘is this secure by design and stable enough to govern?’
Why drift becomes a governance problem
When preventive controls are not continuously validated, drift accumulates and assurance becomes a cycle of exceptions, explanations, and audit disruption.
- Recurring misconfigurations consume second-line and engineering capacity
- Evidence becomes an exercise of discovery as systems evolve
- Higher-stakes resilience risks get crowded out by recurring hygiene
What changes in practice
Preventive controls are treated as engineered system properties: defined, tested, and executed with each change.
- Define controls as code (policy as code)
- Embed validation in CI/CD and provisioning
- Maintain continuous visibility of control posture between reviews
Examples: shifting from detective to preventive
Shift the first line of defence to preventive controls, using monitoring for exceptions rather than the default.
Cloud storage encryption
Move from chasing drift after the fact to blocking insecure configurations before they reach production.
- Detective: alert when storage is created or modified without expected encryption
- Preventive: validate encryption at change time and block non-conformant changes
- Backstop: keep monitoring for out-of-band changes and emergency access
Sensitive data in application logs
Reduce noisy real-time inspection by preventing risky logging paths from being introduced in the first place.
- Detective: inspect production logs for leakage patterns and respond to alerts
- Preventive: analyse logging in CI/tests and enforce masking in code before changes are merged
- Backstop: keep real-time monitoring targeted and higher-signal
Embedding Resilience Engineering into governance
Are late-stage security gates blocking delivery?
If recurring exceptions are consuming governance capacity, audit preparation repeatedly disrupts operations, or delivery relies on late-stage gates, I can help stabilise preventive control validation without slowing delivery.