Scaling Governance and Compliance with GitHub WAF and Elevate

Modernization isn’t just about migrating code—it’s about transforming how your organization governs and evolves its software practices. Once your repositories are on GitHub, the next challenge is ensuring they follow best practices. That’s where GitHub WAF (Well-Architected Framework) and Elevate’s governance capabilities come into play. 

The Governance Gap: Why Best Practices Often Go Unenforced 

In large organizations, it’s common to see hundreds or even thousands of repositories with inconsistent standards. Some use outdated CI/CD patterns. Others lack branch protection rules or secrets scanning. And many teams simply don’t know what “good” looks like. 

Without visibility, it’s impossible to enforce standards. Without automation, it’s impossible to scale enforcement. 

For example, one Elevate customer discovered that only 50% of their repositories met basic compliance standards across categories like application security, architecture, and collaboration. Worse, they had no way to track progress or assign accountability. 

GitHub WAF: A Framework for Modern Engineering 

GitHub WAF provides a structured way to assess and improve repository health. It defines categories such as: 

• Application Security: Are secrets exposed? Are security workflows in place? 
• Architecture: Are repos using approved patterns and templates? 
• Collaboration: Are teams using pull requests, code reviews, and issue tracking? 
• Governance: Are policies like branch protection and CODEOWNERS enforced? 

Elevate integrates directly with GitHub WAF, enabling automated assessments across all these dimensions. 

Elevate’s Compliance Engine: From Audit to Action 

Elevate doesn’t just score your repos—it helps you fix them. Here’s how it works: 

1. Assessment: Elevate runs automated scans across your GitHub org, scoring each repo against WAF categories. 
2. Visualization: Dashboards show compliance at the org, team, and repo level. You can see which areas need attention and track progress over time. 
3. Remediation: Elevate can automatically apply fixes—like enabling branch protection, adding security workflows, or tagging non-compliant repos for review. 

For example, a global SaaS company used Elevate to identify 96 non-compliant repos out of 1,453. Within two weeks, they brought 70% of them into compliance using automated remediation and team-level accountability. 

Real-Time Metrics That Matter 

Elevate tracks key DevOps metrics alongside compliance, including: 

• Deployment frequency 
• Pull request cycle time 
• Batch size 
• Commit activity 

This allows teams to correlate compliance with productivity. For instance, teams with high WAF scores often show faster PR cycle times and more frequent deployments—proving that good governance drives better outcomes. 

Empowering Teams Through Transparency 

One of Elevate’s most powerful features is its ability to decentralize governance. Instead of relying on a central DevOps team to police standards, Elevate gives each team visibility into their own compliance posture. 

Teams can: 

• View their WAF scores 
• See which policies they’re failing 
• Take action directly through self-service portals 

This creates a culture of ownership and continuous improvement. 

In Part 4, we’ll explore how Elevate supports platform engineering through portfolio management, workload design, and developer self-service. Would you like me to draft that next?