AI Infrastructure Security Best Practices

This is the first of a three-part series based on a real-world engagement: a company that scaled from $40M to $1B in annual revenue in just five years, and the security program that had to grow with it. This is a story about building high-performance operating systems where security, standards, architecture, and performance act as enablers rather than constraints. Part 1: Earning credibility before you’ve earned authority. Part 2: Blurring the lines - Security at the SRE and Operations level. Part 3: Wrapping the gift — Transparency and agency. The Inflection Point A few years back, AMTI was at the heart of a fascinating corporate challenge. I was serving as a fractional CISO and advisor for a company standing at a critical inflection point. ...

Most security programs are built around preventing bad things from happening. That’s necessary but insufficient. At AMTI, where I served as CTO and led infrastructure security for a multi-tenant cloud serving customers from single-VM deployments to enterprise DRaaS contracts spanning hundreds of miles of metro fiber, I learned that mature security is about resilience: the capacity to detect, contain, and recover faster than adversaries can escalate. The Visibility Problem at Scale Operating a cloud service provider on your own ASN creates a specific governance challenge: you’re the abuse contact, but in a GDPR-compliant architecture, you have no visibility into customer data. Encrypted traffic is opaque by design. This constraint forced architectural discipline: we couldn’t inspect our way to security, so we had to instrument our way there. ...

Every company says security is a core value. Few embed it as a design constraint. The difference shows up when things break. I get a call from a co-founder I’ve known for years. His company just raised $400M+ Series D. His voice is flat: “We have a problem.” Same day, we’re on a call. He’s a skilled engineer — personally devastated. They leaked over 2 million user records. Home addresses. Phone numbers. The full profile. The data had been publicly accessible for three weeks before anyone noticed. ...

1/5 — The Inception Series: Security Assurance — URE Case — 1/5 Start from the beginning: you’re here. Next: 2/5 — Trust Boundaries This is the first of five short posts on Security Assurance Engineering. The goal is simple: separate security intent from security proof, and show what “assurance” looks like when you treat a system as real—owned, changing, and measurable. I’ll use URE as the working surface. URE is the platform where I publish research notes and operating practice generated in my lab—work that started as a few shared threads with friends and peers, and eventually became worth “productizing” into something durable and navigable. ...

Every company says security is a priority. Every company also ships under pressure. The gap between those two statements is where businesses bleed. I’ve watched organizations with excellent engineers and serious budgets still get humbled by the same pattern: teams optimize locally (features, velocity, “my backlog”), while the system pays globally (incidents, outages, churn, reputational drag). When things go south, it rarely takes a cinematic attacker or a once-in-a-decade failure. ...