ISO 27001 IaC drift detection is the only way to catch these changes before they become violations. Infrastructure as Code is supposed to lock your environments into a known good state. But manual edits, emergency fixes, or unreviewed commits break that contract. Drift is invisible at runtime unless you compare deployed state against your baseline continuously.
Drift detection begins with a source of truth — your IaC repository — and a clear mapping to ISO 27001 Annex A controls. Every configuration in code must link to a requirement: encryption settings, access restrictions, logging retention, secure network boundaries. Then you need automated scans to detect differences between the code and the live environment.
When drift occurs, risk increases. Unencrypted storage buckets, insecure network rules, disabled logging — each one is a nonconformity against ISO 27001. Detecting these violations quickly keeps the scope of remediation small. Slow detection means more unknown change, more complexity, and higher cost to fix.