Beyond DevOps: Kosli and Team Topologies Target Regulated Industries' Compliance Crisis

LONDON – February 05, 2026 – A new strategic partnership between SDLC Governance platform Kosli and organizational design framework Team Topologies aims to solve a critical dilemma plaguing the world’s most regulated industries: how to innovate at the speed of software without breaking the rules of compliance. The collaboration, announced today, directly targets the friction between rapid, AI-assisted development and the often archaic, manual processes required for governance in sectors like finance and healthcare.

By combining automated technical controls with a proven methodology for structuring technology teams, the partnership promises to move organizations beyond traditional DevSecOps towards a more integrated model where compliance is an enabler, not a bottleneck.

The Growing Burden of Compliance

For years, enterprises in financial services, healthcare, and other highly scrutinized fields have been caught in a tug-of-war. On one side, market pressures demand faster delivery of digital products and services. On the other, a complex and ever-expanding web of regulations requires meticulous oversight and evidence collection, often through slow, manual, and error-prone methods. This is the compliance conundrum that sees modern, agile development teams slowed to a crawl by processes reminiscent of pen and paper.

The challenge is intensifying. New mandates like the EU's AI Act and Cyber Resilience Act are making auditable compliance an integral part of the software design process itself. In finance, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) 4.0.1, which becomes mandatory in 2025, shifts the focus towards continuous monitoring and proactive security. Similarly, healthcare organizations navigating HIPAA requirements face immense pressure to build secure custom software while grappling with staffing shortages and rising patient demand. Regulatory bodies globally are signaling a clear shift away from narrative attestations toward a demand for high-quality, continuous, and machine-readable evidence of compliance.

This environment creates a significant market need for solutions that can automate governance and embed it directly into the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Traditional Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) platforms and even some integrated DevOps platforms have sought to address this, but often without tackling the underlying organizational structures that perpetuate friction.

A Dual-Pronged Solution: Technology and People

The Kosli and Team Topologies partnership is significant because it addresses both the technical and human dimensions of this problem. It proposes that true "fast flow" of compliant software is only possible when automated tooling is paired with an organizational design that supports it.

Kosli provides the technical foundation. As an SDLC Governance platform, it specializes in what it calls "controls engineering." This involves automating the collection of evidence throughout the entire development pipeline. From a code commit to a production deployment, the platform can track, verify, and record every step, ensuring that predefined policies are met. This capability enables "continuous compliance" by creating an immutable, audit-ready trail that satisfies regulators' demands for constant proof. By integrating with existing CI/CD toolchains, it allows compliance rules to be defined and enforced as code, shifting governance from a reactive, end-of-cycle audit to a proactive, ongoing process.

Team Topologies provides the organizational blueprint. Based on the best-selling book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, the framework offers a practical guide for structuring business and technology teams to optimize for a rapid flow of value. Its core tenets focus on managing cognitive load—the mental energy required by a team to do its work—by defining clear team types and interaction patterns. By creating well-defined "Stream-aligned" teams that own a specific business domain, supported by "Platform" and "Enabling" teams, organizations can reduce dependencies, clarify responsibilities, and empower teams to move faster.

The synergy is clear: Kosli automates the burdensome tasks of compliance evidence gathering, freeing up developers' cognitive capacity. Team Topologies then organizes those developers into structures that can take full advantage of this newfound freedom, directing their focus toward innovation and value delivery rather than navigating bureaucratic hurdles.

A New Operating Model for Speed and Safety

This integrated approach represents a tailored evolution of DevSecOps, moving beyond simply adding security checks into a pipeline. It's about fundamentally redesigning the system—both technical and social—for continuous, compliant delivery.

"Team Topologies has transformed how organizations think about team structure and flow," said Mike Long, CEO of Kosli, in the announcement. "By combining that expertise with Kosli's automated governance platform, we're helping regulated enterprises discover their tailored operating model to achieve speed and compliance in software delivery."

This vision of a "tailored operating model" is crucial. It acknowledges that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for complex enterprises. The partnership aims to provide a framework and a platform that companies can use to design their own optimal system.

For Team Topologies, the partnership extends its principles into a domain often perceived as rigid and resistant to change. The framework's emphasis on minimizing friction between teams aligns perfectly with Kosli's mission to remove governance friction from the SDLC.

"Kosli stands out as a Team Topologies partner for automated governance due to their deep understanding of the problem space and their elegant technical solution," noted Matthew Skelton, Co-founder of Team Topologies. "The combination of our Enterprise Transformation Package, and expertise from trusted partners like Kosli, is delivering real results around the world for organizations with difficult challenges."

The Path Forward for Regulated Innovation

The collaboration will begin with the publication of joint thought leadership and the development of resources for enterprise technology leaders. The goal is to provide a clear roadmap for organizations looking to implement these combined organizational and technical patterns. For CIOs, CTOs, and Chief Compliance Officers, this partnership signals a shift from viewing compliance as a cost center to seeing it as a component of an efficient, high-velocity delivery system.

By tackling both the code and the culture, the tools and the teams, Kosli and Team Topologies are betting they can finally resolve the long-standing tension between moving fast and staying safe. For regulated industries struggling to keep pace in a digital-first world, this integrated approach may offer the most promising path forward to achieving both innovation and integrity.