Authors: William Turner, Charlotte Evans, Benjamin Lewis, Amelia Scott, Chaitanya Srinivas, Rishi Kumar
Abstract: The rapid adoption of cloud-native technologies and distributed enterprise systems has significantly accelerated the deployment of microservice architectures across highly regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, insurance, and government sectors. While microservices improve scalability, agility, operational flexibility, and continuous service delivery, they also introduce complex governance, security, compliance, and interoperability challenges that organizations must address to maintain regulatory integrity and operational resilience. This research examines the role of platform governance frameworks in managing regulated microservice architectures by analyzing governance mechanisms related to policy enforcement, identity and access management, API security, compliance automation, service observability, risk management, and operational accountability. The study further investigates how governance platforms support secure communication, workload isolation, auditability, and continuous compliance validation within cloud-native ecosystems operating under regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and ISO/IEC 27001. Evidence mapping techniques are utilized to evaluate governance contributions across enterprise microservice environments and identify emerging best practices that improve service reliability, cybersecurity resilience, and regulatory alignment. The findings demonstrate that integrated governance frameworks combined with automation, Zero Trust principles, and continuous monitoring capabilities significantly enhance organizational ability to manage distributed microservice infrastructures securely and efficiently. The research highlights the strategic importance of governance-driven architectures in enabling scalable digital transformation while ensuring compliance, operational transparency, and long-term enterprise sustainability in modern regulated environments.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20607626
