How platform teams can automate infrastructure governance across AWS, Azure, and GCP

You're a platform engineer. Your inbox has seventeen Slack messages about unencrypted databases. Security just sent another spreadsheet of AWS Config violations. A team lead wants to know why their deployment is blocked. And somewhere in the chaos, you're supposed to be building the actual platform.

Sound familiar?

Platform teams have found themselves in an impossible position: you're the bridge between security teams (who set the requirements) and engineering teams (who need to comply). The tools you have? They weren't designed for this job. Not even close.

The problem isn't you. It's that you're trying to use detection tools to solve an orchestration problem.

How you became the accidental governance team

Your company grows. Cloud resources multiply. Someone needs to make sure infrastructure follows security policies, compliance standards, and best practices.

Security teams know what needs to be enforced but don't have the bandwidth. Engineering teams are shipping features and don't want another tool slowing them down.

So it falls to you.

It starts simple. "Just track RDS encryption status across accounts." Fine, you can manage that.

Then it's multi-AZ configurations. Then deletion protection. Backup retention policies. Ownership tracking across three cloud providers. SOC2 audit prep. Coordinating remediation across fifteen engineering teams before the compliance deadline hits.

You're spending 10-15 hours a week on this stuff now:

• Tracking ownership in spreadsheets because no one knows who owns database xyz123
• Chasing teams to fix violations in AWS Config, Azure Policy, GCP Security Command Center
• Switching between three cloud consoles that don't talk to each other
• Playing email and Slack ping-pong to coordinate fixes
• Translating between what security wants and what engineering can actually do
• Copy-pasting data from multiple sources into audit reports

At fifty resources, this is annoying. At five hundred, it's consuming your week. At five thousand? Forget it.

Your tools are solving the wrong problem

AWS Config tells you what's broken. Great. But it doesn't tell you who owns it, what service it supports, or who to ping. Just "database xyz123 is non-compliant."

Now what? You get to play detective across Slack, wikis, and your service catalog to figure out which team needs to fix it.

Azure Policy and GCP Security Command Center have the same gap. They're built for detection, not coordination.

Your security team probably has Wiz or Prisma Cloud. It's good at what it does: finding threats, scoring risks, mapping attack paths. But when it flags an unencrypted database? That alert creates a ticket that lands on your desk anyway. You still have to figure out the owner and chase down the fix.

You could ask engineering teams to check multiple security dashboards. But let's be real: they're already juggling Jira, GitHub, PagerDuty, and your internal portal. They're not adding another tool to their routine.

So you become the human middleware. Copying violations from one system. Tracking status in spreadsheets. Following up manually. Over and over.

What this actually costs you

That 10-15 hours per week? That's half your capacity not spent on the work you actually signed up to do. Not improving developer experience. Not building self-service capabilities. Not making deployments faster.

And as your infrastructure grows, manual processes break down. The gap between policy and reality gets wider. Stuff slips through. Worth noting: 15% of security breaches are caused by infrastructure misconfigurations. The kind that cost millions.

Plus there's the perception problem. You're seen as the blocker, the "no" person. But you're just trying to keep things secure and compliant with inadequate tools.

Detection isn't your problem. Orchestration is.

AWS Config can tell you about 23 databases running end-of-life versions. Your CSPM can flag them as risks. Fine. You know they exist.

Now what?

Those 23 databases are owned by 8 different teams. You need to:

• Figure out who owns each one
• Assign the work to the right people
• Track which ones are fixed and which aren't
• Follow up with teams that are behind
• Report progress to leadership
• Show auditors that you actually remediated everything before the deadline

That's the orchestration problem. And you're doing it manually because your detection tools stop at "here's what's broken."

What would actually help

You need business context built in. When something's misconfigured, you should immediately see: who owns it, what service it supports, how critical it is, who to contact.

You need violations to route automatically. Stop being the middleman who figures out assignments and sends notifications.

You need this to happen where developers already work. In your internal developer portal, tied to their services. Not in yet another dashboard they'll ignore.

You need campaigns that handle the boring parts. Set a deadline, auto-assign tasks, track progress, send reminders, generate audit reports. Without you managing it all in a spreadsheet.

Infrastructure governance should work like a platform capability, not a security bolt-on that dumps manual work on your team.

What actually works

The platform teams doing this well aren't manually catching every violation. They built systems that handle the orchestration automatically.

That's what we built Infrastructure Checks to do. It sits on top of your existing detection tools (AWS Config, Azure Policy, your CSPM) and adds the orchestration layer you're currently handling manually.

One view across all your clouds with ownership and service context. Campaigns that auto-assign tasks, track them, and remind teams when stuff is overdue. Integration with your developer portal so teams see violations in their normal workflow. Compliance dashboards that work for audits without you compiling reports by hand.

You stop being the bottleneck. The work still gets done, but you're not the one doing it.

Want to see it? Schedule a demo to see how other platform teams got out of the manual governance business.

Already using OpsLevel? Infrastructure Checks is available now. Contact your Customer Success team to get started.