Capability 03
DevSecOps & Automation
Automation that survives audit. Cipherer designs DevSecOps practices and platform engineering capabilities that make secure delivery the default, not the exception.
What this discipline means at Cipherer
DevSecOps is the operational discipline that turns secure architecture into secure delivery. We build the pipelines, the platforms and the practices that let engineering teams ship faster while being more compliant, not less. Our work covers DevSecOps transformation programmes, SRE capability uplift, observability standards and the continuous-compliance machinery beneath all of it.
Approach
Pipelines as the security boundary
If a change cannot ship without passing security, compliance and reliability gates, you do not need a separate security gate. We design CI/CD pipelines that bake those checks in: secret scanning, SBOM generation, policy validation, vulnerability assessment, change approval, all as pipeline steps, all measurable.
Infrastructure as code, treated like product code
Terraform is a product surface, not a script collection. We apply software engineering discipline to it: modules, tests, semantic versioning, code review, deprecation paths. The infrastructure estate becomes legible, reviewable and refactorable.
SRE capability built ground-up
We have built SRE practices from scratch for organisations that did not have them, including Scottish Government cloud services. The work covers SLO and SLI definition, incident management, runbooks, post-incident review and on-call hygiene; the goal is reliability that compounds.
Observability as operational truth
Logging, metrics and tracing are not nice-to-haves. We design observability standards so that when something fails, the path from symptom to cause is short, and when something succeeds, the team knows why.
Tools and frameworks
- Terraform, Terragrunt, Atlantis
- GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Argo CD, Flux
- Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry
- Kubernetes operators and platform engineering patterns
- Policy-as-code in pipelines: OPA, Conftest, Sentinel
- GitOps workflows for infrastructure and applications