Caught in the Middle: The New Role of Platform Teams

Earlier this year, the platform team at a global bank introduced a new workflow for developers to provision cloud environments on demand. The goal was to improve delivery speed and reduce dependency on manual approvals. The infrastructure rolled out smoothly. Within weeks, teams were launching workloads across AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure.

Then the questions started.

Finance asked why certain environments were running in high-cost regions. Security flagged resources missing encryption tags. Compliance asked whether logs for nonproduction environments were being stored according to internal policy. The data team asked whether the platform could integrate an AI agent to detect and remediate drift automatically.

None of these were incidents. Nothing failed. The system behaved exactly as designed.

But each question required insight into a different part of the organization. Cloud configuration. Internal policy. Team behavior. Risk exposure. No single group owned the full picture.

The platform team was expected to answer anyway.

Everyday Decisions at Enterprise Scale

In large enterprises, infrastructure work is distributed by design. Application teams own services. Security defines guardrails. Compliance defines requirements. Finance tracks spend. Infrastructure teams manage shared foundations.

Each group operates with partial context.

Platform teams sit closest to the workflows that connect all of this together. As a result, they are pulled into decisions that span multiple domains.

In a typical week, a platform team may be asked to explain:

• Why a workload launched in a region that was technically allowed but operationally discouraged.
• Why certain resources lack cost attribution even though tagging standards exist.
• Whether access patterns comply with internal policy when multiple identity systems are involved.
• Whether an AI-assisted workflow can be audited in the same way as a manual one.

These are not edge cases. They are daily questions that emerge from scale, decentralization and constant change.

Source: env zero.

The Expanding Role of Platform Engineering

Platform teams were originally chartered to improve delivery speed and consistency. Over time, that mandate has expanded.

Today, platform leaders are expected to weigh in on:

• Security posture and enforcement boundaries.
• Cost controls and efficiency trade-offs.
• Compliance visibility and audit readiness.
• Governance around change and access.
• The safe use of AI agents inside infrastructure workflows.

They are not only building systems. They are shaping decisions that carry financial, regulatory and operational consequences.

Yet these expectations rarely come with corresponding authority.

Responsibility Without Structure

Platform teams are often asked to explain outcomes they did not directly cause. They are expected to provide answers without owning the policy, budget or workload.

This creates a structural tension.

The team has enough context to be accountable, but not enough leverage to set direction. They become the place where unresolved questions land, simply because they are closest to the execution layer.

As the number of daily infrastructure events, environment changes, access updates, policy evaluations and AI-driven actions grows, this tension compounds. The work becomes less about building and more about interpreting, coordinating and justifying decisions across teams.

What Needs To Change

If platform teams are going to continue operating at this intersection, organizations need to adjust the way they support them.

That means:

• Making ownership visible across environments, teams and services.
• Involving platform leaders earlier in policy and governance discussions.
• Providing systems that record and explain why decisions were made, not just what changed.
• Giving platform teams the ability to push back when requirements conflict or outpace capacity.

These teams already function as a coordination layer. The structure around them has not caught up.

Conclusion

Platform engineering is no longer confined to infrastructure delivery. It has become a decision-making function that operates across security, compliance, finance and operations.

This shift did not happen all at once. It emerged gradually as systems scaled and responsibilities fragmented.

Platform teams now operate in the middle of the organization by necessity. Recognizing that reality is the first step toward supporting it properly.

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