Cloud governance-as-code startup Stacklet Inc. announced today that it’s adding automated notifications to its platform.

It says it wants to help companies to boost conformance with their operational, security, cost and compliance policies by alerting them to any potential risks. Stacklet is the main contributor to the open-source Cloud Custodian project.

Cloud Custodian makes it possible for all of the tools and scripts that are used to manage cloud operations to be used in tandem through a lightweight, easy-to-use platform. It does this through a stateless rules engine that defines and enables policies, supporting multiple cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

The Stacklet Platform (pictured), based on Cloud Custodian, is meant to provide a more frictionless experience for users with value-added tools, enabling teams to codify and automate cloud governance and align with application development cycles via a standard, easy-to-use declarative language.

Stacklet said today’s update comes in the wake of findings from a recent customer survey it conducted, which showed 38% of respondents believe the lack of collaboration is one of the top barriers to implementing cloud security controls. While the Stacklet Platform provides the tools to implement policies, the lack of proper collaboration and communication across various groups within an organization, such as engineering and finance teams, makes it difficult to know exactly where and when those policies need to be implemented.

That can lead to big problems, with cloud adoption leaving companies at risk of data breaches, cost overruns and potentially catastrophic outages, Stacklet said.

Stacklet’s new intelligent communications capabilities work by using cloud resource configuration and policy metadata to automatically notify governance teams when new services and applications are fired up without appropriate controls. Those notifications can be customized to add context, with the goal being to help teams collaborate more effectively and resolve potential security risk or cost overruns faster.

Better yet, teams can choose to receive the notifications through the channel of their choice, including Slack, Microsoft Teams or Symphony. Stacklet can also create external workflows in third-party tools such as Jira and ServiceNow for teams to track issue resolution and create reports.

By proactively notifying the right teams where and when action needs to be taken, Stacklet says it can help companies avoid security breaches and cost overruns, while eliminating manual workflows and alert fatigue. It can also help companies to respond immediately to any changing regulations.

Along with the new alerting capabilities, Stacklet said today’s release adds more out-of-the-box intelligent analytics, visualization and contextual drill-down tools to help further the adoption of collaborative governance-as-code.

Image: Stacklet