Misconfiguration Before Deployment
Most cloud breaches come not from clever exploits but from misconfiguration, such as a publicly readable storage bucket. When infrastructure is defined as code, those mistakes live in a template that can be checked before anything is built.
What IaC Scanning Does
An infrastructure as code scanner reads declarative templates and evaluates them against a library of security rules.
- It flags storage open to the public.
- It flags unencrypted volumes and databases.
- It flags security groups that allow access from anywhere.
- It flags missing logging and overly broad permissions.
Because it runs on the template, problems are caught before a single resource exists.
Shift Left
Scanning early is cheaper and safer than fixing live infrastructure.
- In the editor so a developer sees issues while writing.
- In the pull request so risky changes fail review.
- Before apply so the deploy is blocked until fixed.
Policy as Code
Rules themselves can be written as code, so an organization encodes its standards once and enforces them everywhere consistently.
Key idea
Infrastructure as code scanning evaluates templates against security rules to catch misconfigurations like public buckets and open ports before deployment, and policy as code enforces those standards consistently.