AI Governance & Security
AI Governance That Actually Ships
Practical frameworks for access control, auditability, and quality gates—built to satisfy auditors without killing velocity.
The Governance Dilemma
Your AI initiatives are stuck. Security review is blocking deployment. Compliance wants audit trails that don't exist. Legal is nervous about liability. The governance framework from that consulting firm sits in SharePoint, disconnected from anything your engineers are building.
Meanwhile, competitors ship AI features. Your board asks what's taking so long.
Most AI governance frameworks fail because they're either abstract principles that engineers ignore, or heavyweight processes that make teams avoid AI entirely. There's a middle path: practical governance that satisfies auditors without turning every prompt change into a six-month review cycle.
What Practical Governance Requires
Effective AI governance isn't a document—it's infrastructure and process integrated into how you build and operate AI systems.
Access Control
Role-based access that separates development, staging, and production environments. Engineers can experiment freely; production changes require appropriate approvals.
Auditability
Comprehensive logging that captures inputs, outputs, model versions, prompt versions, timestamps, and token usage. Structured for analysis and retrievable when auditors ask.
Quality Gates
Automated checks validate quality before production. Evaluation harnesses measure accuracy. Safety checks catch policy violations. Required thresholds must pass or deployment fails.
Incident Response
AI-specific incident classifications, escalation paths, and response procedures. When something goes wrong, your team knows exactly what to do.
Implementation Roadmap
Governance doesn't require a twelve-month initiative. We implement in phases that show results quickly.
By week six, you have governance infrastructure that auditors can inspect. Ongoing refinement happens without disrupting delivery.
Phase 1 (Weeks 1-2): Visibility
Implement logging for all AI interactions. Deploy monitoring dashboards. Understand what you don't currently capture.
Phase 2 (Weeks 3-4): Access Control
Define roles and permissions. Separate environments. Establish change management for prompts and agent configurations.
Phase 3 (Weeks 5-6): Quality Gates
Build evaluation harnesses. Define pass/fail thresholds. Integrate checks into your deployment pipeline.
Phase 4 (Ongoing): Continuous Improvement
Review incidents and near-misses. Refine thresholds based on production data. Update policies as you learn.
What Auditors Actually Want
We've worked with compliance teams across financial services, healthcare, and other regulated industries. They want evidence that you've thought about risks and built controls—not perfection.
Documented Processes
How do AI changes get approved? Who reviews them? Clear process documentation that shows governance in action.
Audit Trails
Can you show what the system did and why? Complete logging and traceability for all AI decisions.
Testing Evidence
How do you validate AI behavior before deployment? Evaluation frameworks and quality gates that demonstrate systematic testing.
Incident Capability
What happens when something goes wrong? Clear incident response procedures and escalation paths.
Security Architecture
AI systems create security considerations beyond traditional applications:
Data Residency
Customer data stays in your cloud, under your policies. We don't route sensitive information through third-party services.
Prompt Injection Mitigation
Input validation and output filtering that reduce risk from adversarial inputs attempting to manipulate agent behavior.
Model Access Controls
API keys and model access managed through your secrets infrastructure, with rotation policies and access logging.
PII Handling
Detection and redaction pipelines for personally identifiable information, ensuring logs don't inadvertently store sensitive data.
Stuck in security review?
We've helped companies in regulated industries get AI systems approved and deployed. Let's talk about your specific compliance requirements.