Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) scanning automatically checks files that define cloud resources and deployment environments, such as templates for networks, storage, permissions, and compute. It looks for unsafe settings, policy violations, and sometimes exposed secrets before those configurations are applied.
In security, IaC scanning helps catch risks early in the development pipeline, when teams can fix them alongside code changes. A scanner may flag publicly accessible storage, overly broad access permissions, or unencrypted resources. Results are most useful when checks run during code review or CI/CD and identify the affected file and a practical remediation. IaC scanning complements code, dependency, and container checks; it does not prove that a deployed environment is secure or replace runtime monitoring.