Continuous compliance in Infrastructure as Code. Building secure and scalable systems

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the process of automating infrastructure management by using declarative code files to configure resources. Tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, and CloudFormation accelerate provisioning for cloud servers, databases, containers, networking components, and more, but these critical assets must be robustly protected to keep your environments compliant.

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Unfortunately, security and compliance is where IaC often falls short. IaC resources are dynamic, can be short-lived, and may be spread across multiple cloud providers. This makes it challenging to monitor what's running and ensure compliance policies are enforced.

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In this article, we're taking a deep dive into IaC compliance strategies. We'll explain why breaches happen, then outline techniques that prevent them. You'll learn how to deeply integrate continual compliance into your IaC workflows to achieve secure infrastructure at scale.

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Understanding IaC Compliance Requirements

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Modern software systems frequently have specific compliance requirements, such as compatibility with GDPR, CCPA, or PCI-DSS legislation. Even if you're not subject to a standard regulatory framework, you probably still have your own organizational policies that infrastructure must adhere to—whether basic security best practices, or more precise rules that maintain consistency in your processes.

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For instance, you may need to ensure that all S3 buckets have public access disabled, or that developers can't create EC2 instances without applying proper security protections.

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Failing to enforce required policies can have devastating consequences. Misconfigured infrastructure resources are more likely to trigger errors and incidents, potentially causing downtime, performance issues, or a security breach. Customers may turn to your competitors or demand compensation. The fallout from non-compliance with mandatory legal standards can be even more severe, invoking large regulatory penalties and significant reputational damage.

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These scenarios might seem hypothetical, but there's plenty of real-world cases of simple misconfigurations causing serious losses. Organizations that have inadvertently leaked data from S3 buckets include Microsoft, Accenture, and major English football clubs, for example.

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Compliance also requires you to know what's actually running. This might sound obvious, but in practice many organizations keep outdated resources around long after they're in active use. For instance, browser testing platform BrowserStack was breached via a disused and unpatched EC2 instance retained in its AWS account.

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Other key IaC compliance risks include:

• Configuration drift caused by manually changing infrastructure resources outside of IaC, leading to inconsistencies and misconfigurations.
• Accidentally embedding secrets inside IaC code.
• Inappropriate over-privileged access to IaC repositories and resources.
• Inconsistent monitoring and policy enforcement across cloud providers.
• Use of outdated or insecure IaC modules that contain security vulnerabilities.

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Successfully avoiding these problems require a scalable IaC compliance strategy. Automated compliance checks should be designed into your processes from day one to eliminate coverage blind spots. It's equally important to foster a compliance culture that empowers all DevOps team members to recognize and resolve potential IaC issues. Here's what you can do to protect your workflows.

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Achieving Continual IaC Compliance

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Continual compliance refers to the treatment of compliance tasks such as monitoring, policy enforcement, and auditing as a non-stop ongoing process. Historically, compliance tended to be a checkbox exercise at key stages in a project's life, but this approach doesn't scale to the dynamic nature of IaC.

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GitOps, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud platforms enable fast-paced infrastructure workflows where hundreds of changes can occur each day. You need to ensure each one preserves your compliance posture to prevent accidental non-compliance with the rules that apply to your projects. Any lapse, however short, poses a serious threat.

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Standard IaC tools don't natively understand compliance needs. For instance, Terraform makes it easy for DevOps teams to provision and configure infrastructure, but doesn't help you control which changes are allowed or when they can be applied. Moreover, your Terraform code could contain accidental misconfigurations that make your infrastructure non-compliant, even though your process appears to work correctly.

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Modern tools allow you to address these issues and reliably achieve IaC compliance. You can use automation to detect problems in your IaC code and prevent them from reaching your infrastructure. There's two main categories of tools to choose from:

• Linters and static analysis scanners: Tools such as Checkov and Terrascan scan your IaC code for common misconfigurations and compliance risks. They come with built-in rules for popular cloud platforms and IaC tools, but you can also add custom policies to enforce your organization's requirements. These solutions are designed to be used locally by developers and within CI/CD pipelines, letting you block IaC deployments if a problem is found.
• IaC orchestration and management platforms: Purpose-built IaC orchestrators like Spacelift and Env0 fully manage your infrastructure processes via an integrated CI/CD workflow. They solve key compliance priorities by providing visibility into your resources, built-in policy-as-code governance controls, and automated drift detection scans. Using an orchestrator removes the need to manually configure CI/CD pipelines or have developers run IaC tools locally, helping ensure consistency.

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These tools need to be embedded in your processes to enforce continual compliance. For instance, IaC changes should only be applied to live resources once they've passed all required tests in your CI/CD pipeline. The pipeline can then handle the deployment and report the results back to the DevOps team.

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Thereafter, it's important to configure regular scans of your live environments to detect drift and identify misconfigured or redundant resources. This process should also be fully automated so you can detect issues as they happen. New findings must immediately trigger alerts that guide you straight to the problem. This prevents non-compliant components from persisting in your cloud accounts.

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The Importance of Policy-as-Code

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IaC management platforms, static analysis scanners, and linters let you use Policy-as-Code principles to define your compliance rules. This approach means you can manage your policies in a similar way to your IaC resources. You can store policies separately to your code, version changes over time, and easily collaborate on rules with other team members.

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There's several Policy-as-Code engines available, but your choice will usually be dictated by what your IaC tools support. Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a widely used option with an expressive policy language, but some IaC services include their own alternatives such as Pulumi CrossGuard.

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The high-level workflow is similar regardless of the specific tool you use. Your policies receive your IaC configs as input, then perform tests against them so you can verify only allowed values are used. You should run your policies each time you apply IaC changes, then abort the deployment if a policy reports an error. Either integrate policy execution into your CI/CD pipeline, or use the mechanisms included with your IaC orchestration platform. Orchestrators are usually the better choice at scale as they also let you create policies that control the when and who of IaC deployments.

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Because policies are written as code in a well-defined language, they should themselves be maintained using a DevOps automation strategy. It's important to test your policies to check they output the expected results. For example, OPA includes a built-in testing framework that lets you validate policy behavior outside of your real IaC projects.

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It's good practice to keep your policy repositories separate from your IaC repos, write tests for every policy, and then run the tests in a CI/CD pipeline when you commit policy changes. You can then merge your tests into a release branch in your policy project, ready to be referenced in your IaC repositories.

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Recap: How to Implement an IaC Compliance Workflow

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Need a recap of what we've discussed? Here's a brief guide to the key steps in achieving continual compliance for IaC workflows.

1. Align all infrastructure deployment processes around an automated CI/CD pipeline.
2. Write Policy-as-Code rules to enforce your compliance requirements.
3. Test your policies to ensure they function correctly.
4. Use an IaC orchestration solution to execute your policies before infrastructure gets updated.
5. Enable automated drift detection and security scans for your live environments.
6. Configure centralized visibility for your cloud accounts and infrastructure assets.
7. Correctly configure DevOps team user accounts to prevent over-privileged access.

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Now let's take a closer look at the tools that let you implement this strategy.

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Key Tools for IaC Compliance

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Cloud automation, IaC, and continuous compliance are hot topics in the DevOps industry. This has produced a new breed of modern tools designed to support IaC compliance initiatives. Here's a summary of some of the top options for different use cases, but there's plenty more great alternatives available.

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1. Spacelift

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Spacelift is a leading IaC orchestration platform. It implements an automated CI/CD workflow for your IaC tools. Spacelift has a strong suite of governance and compliance features, including comprehensive policy-as-code support and precise developer access controls. The platform also offers drift detection capabilities and clear cross-cloud monitoring.

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2. Open Policy Agent (OPA)

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Open Policy Agent (OPA) is one of the most popular Policy-as-Code engines. It's used by many of the top IaC tools and platforms, so learning its Rego policy language is a good first step towards improving IaC compliance.

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OPA policies are granular, expressive, and easy to write. They can execute against any JSON input, such as a Terraform plan file or a Kubernetes manifest. OPA also includes a built-in testing tool that lets you check rules for errors before you start using them.

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3. Terraform Cloud

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Terraform Cloud is Hashicorp's managed Terraform service. It automates your Terraform workflows based on events in your IaC repositories. It supports policy-as-code compliance checks using either OPA or Hashicorp’s own Sentinel engine. You can deploy to both public cloud accounts and on-premises datacenters, enabling you to maintain process consistency in hybrid cloud architectures.

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4. Pulumi

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Pulumi is one of the most popular IaC tools. Its CrossGuard feature supports robust compliance implementations using policy-as-code rules. Organization administrators can enforce that CrossGuard policies execute each time your Pulumi IaC stacks run. Similarly to Pulumi infrastructure code, you can author policies using familiar Node.js and Python code—there's no need to learn a separate language.

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Pulumi provides prebuilt policy sets for Kubernetes and popular cloud providers. The Pulumi compliance center resources also offer dedicated guidance on how to configure common infrastructure services for compatibility with key regulatory frameworks.

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5. Env0

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Env0 is a modern infrastructure orchestration platform similar in purpose to Spacelift. It centralizes, automates, and governs your IaC tools and processes. The platform supports compliance requirements by consolidating infrastructure visibility across your cloud platforms. It directly integrates with popular observability solutions to display metrics from your environments. There's also integrated policy-as-code support via OPA rules, enabling you to precisely control when IaC workflows can run.

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6. Atlantis

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Atlantis implements an automated Terraform pull request process. It connects to your IaC Git repositories, lets you request the Terraform plan for changes directly from your PRs, and applies the plan once the PR's merged. OPA-powered policy-as-code support ensures you can enforce your compliance requirements, while built-in audit logging provides crucial accountability. Atlantis is also a self-hosted tool, enabling you to use it in regulated scenarios where cloud services aren't permissible.

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7. GitLab CI/CD

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GitLab is one of the most popular version control and CI/CD platforms. It also includes suites of features designed for infrastructure and compliance workflows. You can use GitLab to run your IaC pipelines, store your state files, and audit your configs against security policies and custom compliance frameworks.

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8. Checkov

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Checkov is an open-source policy-as-code tool that's specifically designed for IaC. It provides a CLI that analyzes IaC configs from platforms including Terraform, Kubernetes, and CloudFormation. It then reports probable misconfigurations, errors, and security risks. You can extend Checkov with custom policies to implement your own compliance requirements.

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Checkov is a great solution for smaller teams that don't want to try a full IaC orchestration platform. It should be configured to run automatically as part of a CI/CD pipeline, ensuring non-compliant IaC changes are prevented from deploying. Because Checkov is a lightweight tool, it's also convenient for developers to use locally as they work.

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9. Terrascan

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Terrascan implements static analysis and security testing for IaC config files. It supports Terraform, Kubernetes, CloudFormation, Dockerfiles, and more. The built-in policy catalog provides coverage for key AWS, Azure, GCP, GitHub, Docker, and Kubernetes best practices, but you can also write your own rules using OPA. Terrascan is designed to support simple integration with your existing IaC processes, whether as a CI/CD pipeline job, Kubernetes admission controller, or extension of other tools such as Atlantis.

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Best Practices for Continuous Compliance with IaC

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You should now understand how to get started implementing a continual compliance strategy for your IaC workflows. Here's some quick best practices to keep in mind—they'll help you avoid risky unexpected oversights.

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1. Include Compliance Checks at Every IaC Delivery Stage

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Continual compliance should be exactly that: constantly checked and rechecked as IaC changes move from code to cloud. Try to combine IaC code reviews, automated CI/CD policy checks, manual deployment approvals, and periodic scans of live environments.

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2. Use Policy-as-Code Solutions to Robustly Enforce Compliance Requirements

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Policy-as-Code solutions like OPA are the most versatile option for preventing compliance breaches. They let you configure precise rules that your IaC configs must meet. You can then block your pipeline if an unacceptable change is detected.

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3. Test Your Compliance Policies Before You Apply Them

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OPA rules and other code-based policies can contain errors themselves. You should keep your policy repositories separate from your IaC repos and run automated policy tests to detect broken rules before they're enabled in your pipeline.

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4. Use a Centralized IaC Management Platform to Ensure Cross-Cloud/Cross-Tool Visibility and Consistency

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Policies and pre-deployment checks don't guarantee continual compliance—infrastructure drift and missing monitoring capabilities can also cause compliance failings. Use modern tools like Spacelift and Env0 to centrally monitor your infrastructure assets and discover inconsistencies.

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5. Proactively Remove Redundant Infrastructure Resources

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Old infrastructure components are often retained after they're no longer used, in case they need to be restored. In practice, this rarely happens and the assets pose a compliance risk when they're no longer updated to align with changes in your policies. You should schedule times to regularly audit your environments and prune disused resources.

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6. Regularly Review Active Policies and Resolve Any Coverage Gaps

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Compliance requirements change over time, whether due to an evolving regulatory environment or more stringent organizational checks. You should iterate on your compliance strategy by looking for weak spots and developing additional policies or approval mechanisms to address them.

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7. Automate Your Compliance Systems

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Although some compliance checks are inherently manual—such as obtaining reviews before deploying sensitive changes—most should be automated to avoid mistakes and oversights. Including policy checks, vulnerability scans, and automated testing in your CI/CD pipelines is the most reliable way to stop non-compliant infrastructure configs being applied.

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Conclusion: Implement Continual Compliance and Policy-as-Code to Secure IaC Workflows

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IaC empowers you to automate and scale DevOps infrastructure workflows, but it's crucial that your infrastructure assets, pipelines, and config files are protected against unauthorized changes. Improper access controls, missing policy checks, and limited visibility into deployed resources are common causes of compliance breaches that result in serious financial, regulatory, and reputational damage.

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Implementing a continual compliance strategy lets you defend against these threats. The techniques we've discussed in this article, such as combining centralized IaC management platforms and Policy-as-Code frameworks, provide the visibility and control needed to maintain compliance at scale. They let you prove constant compatibility with relevant legislative standards and your own internal policies, reducing the risk of penalties.

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IaC compliance systems should be included in your cloud operations architecture from day one. Designing compliance into your processes makes it much more likely your implementation will be successful. If you're looking for help with your cloud transformation, IaC implementation, or compliance posture, then book a consultation with Semantive. We're cloud strategy experts ready to help you develop compliant IaC workflows that scale.