How do we start if we have no policy-as-code today?

Pick the top 10 controls that would have prevented your last three incidents (public storage, wide IAM, open security groups). Write OPA/Rego tests against Terraform plans and block merges in CI. Keep humans in the loop for the first two weeks, then enforce.

Won’t this slow delivery?

Done right, it speeds you up. Engineers get fast, local feedback in PRs instead of late-stage rejections. Break-glass and kill switches avoid all-hands freezes. Metrics show leaders where to invest to reduce friction.

What about multi-cloud?

Normalize events into a single bus (e.g., Datadog or a custom Kafka topic), keep policy-as-code portable (Rego works across providers), and enforce via GitOps in each environment. Evidence sinks (SBOMs, signatures, immutable logs) are cloud-agnostic.

How do we prove to auditors this is working?

Provide automated artifacts: CI logs showing policy checks, SBOM + signatures, immutable log pointers, incident timelines with timestamps, and screenshots of enforcement in GitOps. Tie controls to specific regulatory requirements in a control matrix.

What KPIs should we report to execs?

MTTD, time-to-containment (subset of MTTR), auto-containment rate, blast radius, incident count by severity, and change failure rate. Include trend lines and tie incidents prevented to revenue/protection estimates.

Security-compliance · Oct 3, 2025 · 10 minute read

Stop Waking the Company: Incident Response That Contains Blast Radius and Proves Compliance

If your IR plan is a PDF in Confluence, it’s already obsolete. Here’s how to turn policy into guardrails, wire up automated detections to the right responders, and ship evidence your auditor will actually accept—without slowing delivery.

Alex Ramirez

Principal Engineer, GitPlumbers

20 years of breaking and fixing distributed systems. Led SRE and security eng at two unicorns, helped five SOC 2 and PCI-DSS audits pass without derailing roadmaps. Ex-AWS, ex-Stripe partner engineering.

Incident response isn’t about heroics at 2 a.m.; it’s about making 2 a.m. boring.

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Stop Waking the Company: Incident Response That Contains Blast Radius and Proves Compliance

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist