Welcome to Control Plane

2026-07-27

I spent 16+ years as a software engineer. I’m now pivoting into IT Audit and technology assurance — starting with ISACA’s IT Audit Fundamentals certificate, then CISA.

Control Plane is where I’ll document that transition: what I’m learning, what surprises me, and eventually what the work actually looks like once I’m doing it professionally.

The name is deliberate. A “control plane,” in engineering terms, is the part of a system that governs everything else. In audit, a “control” is the thing that’s supposed to keep a system correct, secure, or compliant. Every post here starts from the same question: what’s the engineering reality behind this control? Not just what the framework says should happen, but what’s actually happening inside the pipelines, the access models, the infrastructure — and where those two pictures agree or diverge.

That question doesn’t box this blog into information security audit, or financial-systems IT audit, or any one specialty. It applies wherever there’s a system and a control watching it — which, in 2026, is everywhere in IT.

More soon.