Case Study: Engineering Leadership for Cloud Compliance & Partner Audits

Company: Logicworks (acquired by RapidScale, a Cox Communications company)

Role: Director of Engineering, Director of Technical Product Management

Focus: Audit Defense & Compliance Strategy

The Challenge

Logicworks maintains some of the most rigorous accreditations with managed cloud hosting: AWS Premier Tier Partner, Azure Expert MSP, and HITRUST/HIPAA compliance. Maintaining these statuses requires passing intense, biannual third-party audits. Losing any of these accreditations would directly impact the company's Go-to-Market strategy and enterprise sales pipeline.

The Solution: Compliance-as-Code

I led the engineering strategy to transform "compliance" from a manual documentation task into an automated feature of the Cloud Automation Platform. By baking audit requirements directly into the Terraform code and CMDB configuration defaults, we ensured that every client environment was deployed in a compliant state by default—creating a "Compliance Inheritance" model where customers could leverage our certifications to accelerate their own.

Key Responsibilities by Audit Type

1. Cloud Partner Audits (AWS Premier Tier & Azure Expert MSP)

These audits focus on technical competency, process maturity, and automation capability.

  • Audit Defense & Representation: Served as technical and product point of contact during the multi-day on-site/virtual audits, leading and recording demonstrations of the platform’s automation capabilities for the auditors.

  • Evidence Orchestration: Directed the product management & engineering teams in gathering and curating technical evidence (e.g., platform technical docs, anonymized config histories, exports, backup logs, cross-region copy logs) to prove that our platform facilitated continuous compliance rather than just point-in-time compliance.

  • Demonstrating "Next-Gen" Managed Services: Presented deep-dive technical sessions to auditors showing how the platform automates "Day 2" operations, specifically demonstrating:

    • Self-Healing: How CloudWatch/Azure Monitor alarms trigger automated & logged support processes.

    • Patch Management: How the CMDB automatically orchestrates immutable infrastructure updates or rolling patch cycles.

    • Security: How the platform enforces security agent installations and ensures communication between the agents and security providers.

    • Cost Controls: How the platform programmatically supports Reserved Instance/Savings Plan cost optimizations.

2. Regulatory Compliance Audits (HITRUST & HIPAA)

These audits focus on security controls, data privacy, and risk management.

  • Control Mapping & Gap Analysis: Translated distinct HITRUST CSF controls into specific engineering and technical product management tasks.

  • "Compliance Inheritance" Architecture: Designed the Shared Responsibility Model documentation that delineated which controls were "Logicworks Managed" (Physical Security, Patching, Backups) vs. "Customer Managed" (App Logic), enabling sales teams to hand clients a pre-certified "Compliance Matrix."

  • Drill & Incident Simulation: Planned and executed tabletop exercises for Incident Response (IR) and Business Continuity to generate the "Evidence of Effectiveness" required by HITRUST auditors.

  • Vulnerability Remediation Management: Managed remediation of findings from penetration tests and vulnerability scans, ensuring zero "High/Critical" vulnerabilities existed during the audit window.

Business Impact

  • 100% Audit Success Rate: Successfully defended and renewed AWS Premier, Azure Expert MSP, HITRUST, and HIPAA compliant status consecutively during my tenure.

  • Revenue Enablement: The "HITRUST Inheritance" program became a primary differentiator, directly contributing to closing contracts with major healthcare payers and providers.

  • Reduced Audit Fatigue: By automating evidence collection via the platform, we reduced the engineering hours required for audit prep by ~30% year-over-year.