[AG.ACG.2] Implement controlled procedures for introducing new services and features

Category: FOUNDATIONAL

To maintain the balance between encouraging innovation and upholding compliance and governance requirements, platform teams need a scalable, controlled procedure for introducing new cloud vendor or third-party services to be used.

DevOps culture encourages continuous learning and exploration of new technologies, tools, and services. Provide teams with the ability to explore and experiment with new features and services while maintaining organizational security and compliance standards. Structure these exploration opportunities in a controlled, secure manner, to promote agility without compromising integrity.

Establish well-defined guardrails that uphold security and compliance when introducing new features and services. This includes access restrictions, acceptable use cases, and alignment with security policies. Create sandbox environments where teams can safely explore and test these features without compromising production environments or violating governance policies. Develop a systematic, scalable onboarding process which allows platform teams to enable guardrails and policies for governing usage of the service, which leads to enabling the feature or service in other environments, including production.

Follow the principle of least privilege by granting teams access to use only specific actions or API calls for approved services. As services update and add new features, this will help ensure that the platform team reserves the ability to perform onboarding procedures with these new features as well.

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