Speed without recoverability is theater. My job is to make sure we can ship fast and back out of a bad change at machine speed, any day the cloud blinks.
Let me ground this in a fresh scar everyone felt on a typical Wednesday.
On October 29, 2025, one configuration push to Azure Front Door rippled into a global lockout. Identity broke, portals went dark, manual workarounds took over. Eight hours later the lights came back—but the lesson is older than cloud: you cannot outsource resilience. Vendors own their SLOs; we own our output. That means architectural divergence, identity fallbacks, and a rehearsed plan for when the hyperscaler stumbles.Estimates of the cost of this outage: to the tune of $16Bn globally.
So what do we actually control? Everything between intent and impact—the chain of moves that turns ideas into uptime.
Output Is a Chain, Not a Feature
If any link fails, output drops to zero. From a CISO’s seat, the chain includes governance and muscle memory:
1) Plan
- Pre‑mortems tied to revenue flows. Enumerate failure modes per journey (checkout, claims, activation) and quantify revenue-at-risk.
- Clear decision rights. Who calls go/no‑go/rollback? What signals cross those thresholds?
- Risk register you can route on. Each risk maps to a traffic control, identity fallback, and data protection pattern.
2) Design
- Architectural divergence. Multi‑CDN, regional isolation, dual control planes.
- Idempotency and circuit breakers. Jobs restart cleanly; dependencies have budgets.
- Identity caches and break‑glass. Local auth caches where policy allows; explicit workforce fallback paths.
3) Operate
- SLOs for throughput and recovery. MTTR, MTDD (mean time to decision), and rollback time are first‑class.
- Observability with actions. Alerts link to runbooks, not just graphs.
- Drills. Detect → decide → degrade → recover, on a timer.
4) Review
- Blameless, accountable post‑incident. Findings change the SOP, not just the slide deck.
- Ledger of resilience debt. Prioritize by revenue protected.
Principles are great; now let’s make them operable. This is where CISOs earn their keep.
The Change‑Management Fundamentals (Boring, On Purpose)
Change killed us; change will save us. Here’s the minimum bar I expect across infra, platform, and app teams.
A. Change Intake & Control
- Two‑key deploys (author ≠ approver) for edge/identity/routing; separation of duties is non‑negotiable.
- Windows for high‑blast‑radius work; the escape hatch is audited and rate‑limited.
- Signed, versioned, diff‑able configs. No snowflakes; every push has a cryptographic paper trail.
B. Progressive Exposure by Default
- Pre‑prod parity with synthetic traffic + contract tests.
- Rings (canary → region → world) with auto‑halt on anomaly (auth failures, error budget, latency SLO).
- Rollback is a program, not a hope. When guardrails trip, reversal starts automatically.
C. Rollback as a First‑Class Product
- Last Known Good (LKG) is built, signed, and exercised monthly.
- Rollback fire drills on edge/identity every month. Time‑boxed and scored.
- One‑click traffic shed to alternate CDNs/regions/providers.
D. Identity Survives the Edge
- Device‑bound token caches (policy‑bounded TTLs) and read‑only modes for workforce.
- Break‑glass accounts with hardware keys, out‑of‑band approval, and recorded use.
- Federation fallback (secondary IdP / read‑only directory mirror) for tier‑1 apps.
E. Observability That Decides
- User‑centric views: who’s impacted and what to do next.
- Runbook‑per‑alert, first three operator actions embedded.
- MTDD dashboard: detect → decide → rollback, on a timer.
If you want the quick-start version, here’s the checklist I hold teams to.
The Output Reliability Stack (CISO Cut)
Use this to turn AI into dependable throughput—even when your vendor trips.
Traffic & Entry
- Multi‑CDN in front of public apps.
- Health‑based steering with synthetic probes.
- LKG (Last Known Good) configs stored, signed, and exercised quarterly.
Identity & Access
- Local auth caches (policy‑bounded TTLs).
- Controlled read‑only modes and explicit break‑glass for workforce.
- Conditional access profiles for outage posture.
Data & Jobs
- Write‑ahead logs; idempotent ops; retry with jitter.
- Backpressure and bulkheads to protect downstreams.
- Hot/warm DR for critical stores; immutable backups for ransomware posture.
Applications
- Feature flags for graceful degradation.
- Dependency budgets to prevent cascade failure.
- SLA‑aware queues for deferred work.
Observability
- Customer‑journey views tied to SLAs and revenue segments.
- Alert → runbook → owner, always co‑located.
- Dashboards that track recovery steps and timers, not just lines.
People & Practice
- Quarterly game days with exec participation.
- On‑call decision trees and comms templates.
- Single status source of truth.
Prefer a timeboxed path? Run this play exactly once and you’ll feel the difference.
30‑Day Readiness Plan (Do the Work)
Week 1 — Pick the Flow
- Choose one revenue‑critical journey (checkout, claim, lead‑to‑meeting).
- Baseline elapsed time, abandonment, error rate.
- Identify the single point of authentication and single traffic entry.
Week 2 — Place the Guardrails
- Add a second CDN; turn on health‑steered failover.
- Cache identity tokens where policy allows; define read‑only mode.
- Implement LKG with automated rollback tests.
- Document workforce break‑glass and test it.
Week 3 — Design for Graceful Failure
- Define acceptable degraded states (read‑only, offline capture, delayed settlement).
- Add circuit breakers and idempotency where missing.
- Wire error budgets to auto‑halt rollouts.
Week 4 — Rehearse
- Run a 2‑hour game day simulating IdP unavailability and CDN failure.
- Measure: time to detect, time to decision, time to customer comms, time to partial recovery.
- Turn every finding into a ticket with an owner and a due date.
If you want a partner instead of a checklist, here’s what we bring to your table.
What Chiri Delivers
- Output Map — How work becomes revenue, with exact places reliability protects output.
- Reliability Ledger — A prioritized list of divergence investments (multi‑CDN, identity resilience, data protection, graceful degradation) quantified by revenue at risk.
- SLOs for Output — Targets for cycle time, recovery time, and error budgets, tied to the board scorecard.
- Runbooks & Drills — Clickable, role‑based playbooks for access loss, traffic loss, data stall; quarterly practice calendar.
- Fast Wins (30 Days) — A second traffic path in front of your critical app; a documented & tested workforce access fallback; a measurable cut in time‑to‑decision.
Bottom line, in plain language:
AI doesn’t create output on its own; speed + reliability + planning does. My ask: make rollback boring, make drills routine, and treat divergence as a feature, not a cost.
When the cloud blinks, your customers shouldn’t. Let’s make recovery muscle memory.