What is Policy Versioning?

A policy that was correct last week might not be correct today. New tools are added, agent scopes change, compliance requirements evolve, and incidents reveal gaps. Policies must change — but uncontrolled changes to security policies are themselves a security risk. A misconfigured policy could expose sensitive data or block legitimate operations. An unauthorised change could weaken controls without anyone noticing.

Policy versioning solves this by applying the same rigour to policy changes that software engineering applies to code changes. Every modification is a commit with an author, timestamp, and message explaining why the change was made. Every version is preserved, so you can see exactly what the policy looked like at any point in history. Differences between versions are visible as diffs, making review straightforward.

For compliance, policy versioning is essential. Auditors need to know not just what your current policies are, but what they were during the audit period. If a security incident occurred on a specific date, you need to know which version of the policy was active at that time. Git provides this history automatically — every commit is a snapshot that can be reconstructed.

Versioning also enables safe experimentation. Teams can branch, test policy changes against real traffic patterns, and merge only after validation — reducing the risk that a well-intentioned change creates a new vulnerability.

Intercept reads YAML policies from the filesystem, making git the natural version control system. Organisations store their policy files in a git repository — every change goes through a pull request, gets reviewed by a security or platform team member, and is merged only after approval. Intercept picks up the new policy files on deployment, ensuring the enforced version always matches the version in git. The git history serves as a complete audit trail of every policy change, who made it, and when.