“Be innovative.”
“Move faster.”
“Experiment with AI.”
“Challenge how we do things.”
Absolutely. Just raise a ticket first.
And allow five working days.
There’s something wonderfully contradictory about organisations investing millions in innovation while making employees fill out forms to get somewhere to experiment.
To be fair, the cloud platform teams aren’t the villains here.
They’ve got a difficult job. Security, governance, budgets, permissions, compliance. All important. All necessary.
But here’s what bothers us.
When did governance become synonymous with someone manually approving and configuring everything?
In our conversations with enterprise cloud teams, familiar challenges keep coming up.
How do we give different departments access to AWS without losing control? How do we let non-technical employees experiment? How do we allocate costs? How do we make sure temporary environments don’t become permanent expenses?
Perfectly reasonable questions.
But they shouldn’t require reinventing the wheel for every new user, project or initiative.
Imagine ordering a company laptop if every request required IT to assemble the hardware from individual components.
Absurd.
Yet that’s not a million miles from how some organisations still provide access to cloud environments.
The answer isn’t unrestricted AWS access. It’s standardised, pre-approved environments with the right permissions, budgets, controls and automatic cleanup already built in.
Let people get on with experimenting. Let platform teams focus on designing and improving the service, rather than administering every transaction.
And reserve manual intervention for the things that genuinely need it.
Perhaps the best measure of a cloud platform team isn’t how quickly it closes tickets. It’s how many tickets it has made unnecessary.
Photo by @silverkblack on Unsplash.
Written by
James Simpson · Co-founder, Sandbox Studio
James leads product at Sandbox Studio. He has spent more than a decade helping organisations adopt AWS safely, and now focuses on giving every team fast, governed access to the cloud without the operational overhead.
