Why we built our own compliance platform instead of just recommending one

For a while, our compliance and cost engagements followed the same pattern: assess the client's environment, find a mix of real security gaps and real cost waste, then recommend a combination of tools to keep monitoring both going forward. Increasingly, that meant one tool for compliance, a different tool for cost, and a manual process to reconcile the two whenever a finding in one turned out to be relevant to the other.

That reconciliation step is where most of the real insight was getting lost. An unused, publicly-exposed storage bucket is both a compliance finding and a cost finding, but if the two tools evaluating your environment don't share a data model, nobody sees that connection without manually cross-referencing two separate reports.

So we built Cloud & Kubernetes Performance & Compliance as the platform we kept wishing existed for our own engagements: one continuous scan across AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes, evaluated against both the compliance frameworks an organisation has opted into and against real utilisation data for cost and performance recommendations — from the same inventory, not two disconnected ones.

We also built it with three deployment tiers from day one, because the regulated organisations we work with most often have genuine, non-negotiable constraints on what can leave their environment. A SaaS pull model works for plenty of clients; others need an in-account collector that only ever sends findings, never raw configuration, back to us; a few need it fully self-hosted, with nothing leaving their infrastructure at all. We didn't want to be the reason a well-run, security-conscious team couldn't use decent tooling.

It's still actively used on our own consultancy engagements, which is the same discipline we'd recommend to anyone building internal tooling: use what you ship, not just what you sell.