Capability 03 / 18
Security by Design
Baking compliance and protection into every layer, from day one.
Security bolted on after launch is friction — a compliance checklist fighting a system that was never designed for it. Security by design means the opposite: threat modeling and access boundaries are part of the architecture review, not a gate that shows up after the build is done.
That's identity and access governance, encryption and secrets handling, and audit trails designed in from the schema up — so the system is compliant because of how it's built, not despite it.
What this looks like in practice
- •Threat modeling as a standard part of architecture review, not a post-launch audit
- •Least-privilege access baked into service and data design from the start
- •Secrets and credential lifecycle management treated as core infrastructure, not an afterthought
- •Compliance requirements (SOC 2, GDPR, and similar) mapped to design decisions, not retrofitted