Forward Deployed · Security
Security that ships with the product, not after it.
Most breaches do not come from clever attackers. They come from unmonitored doors, unowned systems and security bolted on too late. Our Forward Deployed security engineers work inside your team to find what is exposed, shut it down, and leave software that is defensible by design.
Partnering with Releaseworks really raised the bar for us; transparent, structured and professional. It feels like our company motor just got a powerful, high-performance upgrade!
Carola KrasCOO & Co-founder, iClaim
What you get
Security Issues Fixed, From Day One
- A real inventory of what is exposed, and who can reach it
- Detection that tells you in hours, not from a customer email
- Scanning and secrets hygiene wired into every pipeline
- Evidence ready when the security questionnaire lands
Three questions. No call required.
Partnering with Releaseworks really raised the bar for us; transparent, structured and professional. It feels like our company motor just got a powerful, high-performance upgrade!
Carola KrasCOO & Co-founder, iClaim
We have shipped production systems for
ISO 27001
and Cyber Essentials programmes delivered end to end
AWS Partner
with certified security engineers on every engagement
1 named engineer
in your team, not a rotating bench
The problem
You cannot defend what nobody owns.
There is no current inventory of what is internet-facing. Access grew organically and nobody has audited it. Critical findings sit in a backlog because there is no agreed owner or deadline. Logs are collected but nobody is watching them, so if you were breached today you would hear about it from a customer.
Meanwhile every enterprise deal arrives with a security questionnaire, and the answers are assembled from memory the week it is due. The gap is not knowledge, it is capacity: nobody in the team has the time or the scar tissue to close it properly.
Signals you will recognise
- No clear inventory of internet-facing assets
- MFA and SSO are not universal on critical systems
- Critical CVEs sit in the backlog for months
- Nobody is actually watching the logs
- Security review is a release blocker engineers route around
How it works
A security engineer who writes code, not just findings.
Our engineer embeds with your delivery team rather than sitting beside it. They read the architecture, run the exposure baseline, then fix things: identity cleanup, secrets rotation, pipeline controls, detection rules. All as pull requests your team reviews.
The goal is that whole classes of risk stop appearing, because the paved road makes the secure thing the easy thing. Flexible by design: a day a week to keep posture moving, or full time ahead of an audit or a funding round.
Outcomes
Tangible outcomes, not a risk register.
An exposure baseline you trust
A real inventory of internet-facing assets, identities and data flows, with the loud open doors closed in the first weeks.
Identity and secrets under control
SSO and MFA across critical systems, least-privilege roles that reflect reality, and secrets out of repos and into a managed vault.
Detection and response that works
Centralised logging, tuned detections with a named owner and severity, and an incident response plan your team has actually rehearsed.
Security in the pipeline
SAST, dependency and container scanning, secret detection and policy-as-code running on every merge, with remediation SLAs that stick.
Hardened by default
Golden images, secure service scaffolding and threat modelling at design time, so new services do not reintroduce last year's weaknesses.
Evidence on tap
Controls mapped to ISO 27001, SOC 2 or Cyber Essentials with evidence collected continuously, so questionnaires and audits stop being fire drills.
How we embed
Clear stages. You're in control.
Day one: inside the team
Accounts, repos, cloud read access. We run the exposure baseline and give you an unvarnished read on what is actually at risk.
Week one: the loudest door closed
We fix the highest-severity, lowest-drama exposure first, so you get a real reduction in risk before you commit to anything longer.
Steady state: risk down every sprint
Findings triaged with your lead, remediation shipped as pull requests, detections tuned, and a weekly written view of where posture is moving.
Exit: defensible by design
Runbooks, policies and controls live in your repo, your engineers own the pipeline gates, and the evidence keeps collecting itself.
Why Releaseworks®
A team you can trust with production.
Senior engineers, based in London
Over 20 years building and running production SaaS and business-critical platforms for global brands across finance, health, and retail.
Full-time, background-checked staff
No subcontractors, no offshore handoffs. The person on the kickoff call is the person writing the code.
Embedded with your team
We work in your repo, your tools, and your standups, so your engineers see every decision and keep the capability after we leave.
Trusted advisors, not vendors
Founders and CTOs keep us on speed-dial long after the engagement ends, because we tell them the truth and stay accountable for outcomes.
Technologies
Certified, and hands on with it every day.
Our Security FDE engineers hold certifications in these tools and use them in production, not just on slides. If your stack is not listed, ask. We have almost certainly run it somewhere.
In practice
What working with us actually looks like.
Reduce the chance you are the next breach in the news, shrink the cost when something does go wrong, and walk into board, customer and regulator conversations with evidence rather than optimism.
- Your tools, your cloud accounts, your tracker. We do not import ours.
- Remediation lands as pull requests your team reviews and merges.
- Named engineer, UK-based, background-checked. NDAs and DPAs as standard.
- Findings get an owner, a severity and a date, or they are not findings.
- Day rate or monthly rate. Scale up before an audit, down afterwards.
- We train your engineers as we go, so the controls survive us.
FAQ
The questions we get before kickoff.
Is this a penetration test?
No. A pen test tells you what is broken on one day. Our engineer embeds with your team and fixes the causes, then wires controls into the pipeline so the same classes of issue stop coming back. We will happily work alongside your pen testers.
Can you get us through ISO 27001 or SOC 2?
Yes, and if that is the whole job, our fixed-scope ISO 27001 and SOC 2 engagement is usually the better fit. The embedded model is for teams who want posture to keep improving after the certificate.
Do you replace our security team?
No. If you have one, we add senior hands and hand the work back. If you do not, we build the capability inside your engineering team rather than creating a silo.
How quickly can someone start?
Usually within a week, with a named engineer rather than whoever is available.
How is this priced?
A daily or monthly rate depending on how much of the engineer you want. Three questions in the quote funnel and you will see the numbers.
Next step
Get a Security engineer on your team.
Three questions and you will see how our Forward Deployed Engineers work, who you get, and what it costs daily or monthly.