Client Problem: Cloud Platform Reliability & Governance

From a business standpoint, the cloud was expected to deliver faster releases without compromising security or cost discipline. In practice, the cloud platform struggled to sustain the pace and scale of ongoing growth.

Confidence in the platform eroded across engineering, security and finance teams.

Key challenges observed:

• Inconsistent delivery experience

Application teams experienced different behaviours across environments, despite following similar deployment processes. This inconsistency slowed releases and reduced confidence in production readiness.

• Security and risk were introduced late

This forced teams into rework and extending approval cycles at the most critical stages of delivery.

• Rising cloud costs without ownership

Spend increased steadily, but accountability was unclear. Optimisation efforts lacked the guardrails needed to prevent repeat overruns.

• Platform teams operating reactively

Instead of enabling teams, cloud engineers were pulled into incident resolution, access fixes and manual reviews.

Technical Pain Points:

The cloud environment had evolved organically, without a consistent platform blueprint. As scale increased, gaps in standardisation and automation became increasingly visible.

These issues created complexity that was difficult to manage operationally.

Key technical issues included:

• No formal landing zone model

Subscriptions and environments were created on demand, with limited isolation or standardisation between workloads.

• Inconsistent identity and access controls

Manual role assignments and team-specific patterns increased security risk and audit complexity.

• Unstructured network design

Ad-hoc virtual networks made traffic flows hard to secure and troubleshoot.

• Manual infrastructure provisioning

Portal-driven changes caused configuration drift and reduced repeatability.

• Limited DevSecOps enforcement

CI/CD pipelines lacked embedded security, policy and infrastructure validation.

• Governance without automation

Security, tagging and cost standards existed as guidance rather than enforceable controls.

Operational Impact

The technical gaps translated directly into operational instability and delivery friction.

Observed operational impact:

• Unpredictable releases

Environment drift caused deployments to fail unexpectedly.

• Late security intervention

Issues surfaced after deployment, thereby increasing rework and risk.

• High operational overhead

Engineers spent excessive time investigating manual or undocumented changes.

• Reactive cost management

Optimisation occurred after overruns, not through preventative controls.

• Fragmented ownership

No single team owned the cloud foundation end-to-end.

Root Cause Analysis

Rather than immediately implementing fixes, the team conducted a structured root cause analysis across architecture, operations and governance.

A deeper assessment revealed that the issues were not caused by the cloud platform itself, but by how it was engineered and operated.

Root causes identified:

• Lack of cloud platform ownership

Foundational components such as identity, networking, and logging were treated as setup tasks rather than shared platform services.

• Manual change accumulation

Infrastructure changes were applied directly in live environments, eroding consistency and making rollback unreliable.

• Security positioned as a gate, not a guardrail

Controls were enforced through reviews instead of being embedded into delivery pipelines.

• Cost signals without actionability

Usage data existed but was disconnected from policy enforcement or accountability structures.

Scale amplifying inconsistency

Each new workload increased variation instead of benefiting from shared standards.