IaC Scanning (Infrastructure as Code Scanning)
IaC scanning is a method that statically analyzes infrastructure-as-code files, such as Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, and Dockerfiles, to catch insecure configurations like public storage, open ports, or missing encryption before the infrastructure is provisioned.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) defines cloud and platform resources declaratively in files, so a misconfiguration written there becomes a misconfiguration deployed everywhere it is applied. IaC scanning analyzes these definition files, including Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, and Dockerfiles, before they are provisioned.
The scanner parses each file and evaluates it against a library of security rules and benchmarks (often aligned to CIS and cloud provider best practices). Typical findings include publicly exposed storage buckets, overly permissive security groups or IAM policies, disabled encryption, missing logging, and containers running as root. Because the check is static, it runs in seconds without touching a live account.
For developers and platform teams, IaC scanning shifts cloud security left: problems are caught in pull requests rather than discovered after resources go live. This prevents whole classes of misconfiguration from ever reaching production and keeps environments consistent with policy.