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Security · 6 min read

A practical enterprise security model for automation

Security review is where most automation programmes lose a quarter. Structuring controls at the platform level is how you stop paying that cost repeatedly.

Owen RadcliffeSecurity Architect

Review the platform once, not every workflow

If each new workflow triggers a full security review, automation will never outrun the review queue. The alternative is to establish controls at the workspace level — identity, access, residency, retention, audit routing — and have workflows inherit them by construction.

The review then asks a narrower and far more answerable question: does this workflow stay inside the boundary that was already approved?

Controls worth establishing first

These are the ones that appear in nearly every questionnaire, and the ones that are painful to retrofit.

  • Identity from the corporate directory, with de-provisioning that removes access
  • Role-based access scoped to the smallest useful unit of work
  • Secrets in a managed vault, never inline in a definition
  • Immutable audit events covering publish, run and manual override
  • Field-level masking applied before data reaches an intelligence step

Be precise about what you claim

Describe capabilities accurately and separately from certifications. 'The platform supports SSO and exports immutable audit events' is a statement about the product. A named compliance certification is a statement about an audit that either happened or did not. Conflating the two is how a security review turns adversarial.

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Apply it

See these ideas running in the platform

The product and platform pages show how these principles are implemented in Forge itself.