article
Platform Engineering – five recommendations
“Ideally, it should take at least a month before we can start working on the great idea we agreed on this morning,” said no business leader or software developer ever.
That line captures a cultural divide we often see between the business, IT, and external vendors—a divide that frequently becomes clear when we start new Platform Engineering projects.
October 6, 2026 · Jacob Mygind
- Cloud and Platforms
When IT Operations Become Software
Many organizations face a common challenge: the business, the IT department, and external vendors are out of alignment. The business wants solutions delivered quickly to drive efficiency and innovation. IT prioritizes security and stability. The result is competing priorities and delays.
Our Platform Engineering team frequently sees four key frustrations among clients:
- Time to value
“We want to reduce the time from idea to valuable business IT.”
“Deliveries from my IT department often take 4–8 weeks.” - Costs
“We need to stop costs from increasing linearly.”
“Our cloud costs have gotten completely out of control.”
“Why does every new project mean we need more people in the operations team?” - Repetitive, demotivating tasks
“We’re too busy doing manual work to automate our work.”
“Why do we have to go through all that paperwork just to complete simple tasks?” - Vendor lock-in
“It takes months to negotiate new supporting services because they’re not in the vendor’s service catalog.”
“Our vendor has raised prices by 20% and is unwilling to negotiate.”
“The quality of our vendor’s services has dropped dramatically since the ‘honeymoon period.’”
So how do we solve these problems?
In our view, Platform Engineering (also known as Site Reliability Engineering) is the answer to the frustrations and goals outlined above. In short, Platform Engineering is what happens when a team of software developers is put to work not only on creating business functionality, but also on developing operational processes in code. With DevOps, the aim is to minimize the problems that arise when handing over to operations. With Platform Engineering, the aim is to eliminate them. “You build it, you own it” is the mindset behind the future of IT operations.
To understand the value of Platform Engineering, and of defining operational processes in code, it’s important to recognize that it also represents a break with the outsourcing model that most companies explored in the 1990s and 2000s. We see a trend where companies and organizations adopting these new operating models also accept a high degree of insourcing to avoid the delays and loss of control associated with external providers. This often happens in parallel environments, starting with the departments that are furthest ahead technically.
To avoid repeating the problems that created the need for these new software solutions in the first place, we have five recommendations:
1. Build one or more internal platform teams instead. Start today, in parallel with your existing departments.
2. Make sure your IT operating models don’t bring the classic problems back in-house. Draw clear lines between what should be handled in code and what should be handled through human, manual processes (ITIL/TOGAF, etc.).
3. Build all processes in code. Work toward eliminating all manual processes.
4. A Platform Engineering team practices “servant leadership.” From the start, make sure that the new teams understand that their role is entirely about making life better and easier for their colleagues.
5. Make sure security controls are automated, and minimize the number of manual processes involved in implementing security.
Our Platform Engineering team helps organizations with:
- Building private and public clouds
- Automating the use of private and public clouds
- Designing and building secure-by-default and compliant-by-default network and identity configurations. It requires an initial investment of time and effort, but eliminates thousands of frustrating hours down the line and gets you ready for audits.
- Building 24/7 self-service cloud infrastructure and supporting services—reducing service requests.
- Building software that replaces your operational runbooks and knowledge base, along with reactive monitoring (“self-healing”)—reducing incidents before your users discover them.
- Driving cultural and process change—so you can gradually transform operations teams into agile Infrastructure-as-Code teams.
- Recruiting and training internal Platform Engineering/SRE teams that can handle all of the above, keeping knowledge and capabilities firmly within your organization.
No content is available yet.