What Every CTO in a Regulated Industry Should Know About Their Engineering Stack

Threshold questions every CTO in a regulated industry should be able to answer about their stack

The CTO of a regulated industry organisation is accountable for engineering decisions they often did not make â€” systems built before they joined, architectures inherited from vendors, compliance controls implemented by teams they don't directly manage. The 15 questions in this framework are not a comprehensive compliance assessment. They are the threshold questions: the ones where a 'don't know' answer indicates a gap that will surface in the next audit, penetration test, or incident. They cover encryption key custody, audit log retention, BAA and data processing agreement coverage, penetration test currency, SBOM existence, and incident response test history.

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The engineering behind this article is available as a service.