The Hidden Impacts of Drift

Infrastructure drift can significantly disrupt IT operations by affecting reliability, visibility, governance, and costs. It occurs when changes are made outside of IaC deployment processes, leading to unexpected behaviors and vulnerabilities. The main causes of infrastructure drift include high-severity issues, frustration with set processes/tools, human errors, edge cases for quick changes, lack of automation, API changes, and improper role-based access control (RBAC). Drift can affect an organization in four key areas: visibility, governance, reliability, and cloud costs. It forces operations teams to inspect configurations manually, slows down the delivery pipeline, reduces productivity, and creates challenges for security audits. Inadequate governance makes drift virtually inevitable, while misconfigurations create risk for architects and security teams. Drift can introduce security vulnerabilities, resulting in data breaches and financial consequences. It also affects application performance, leading to latency issues, degraded performance, downtime, API failures, and failed deployments. Infrastructure drift increases costs through unaccounted resource consumption, budget overruns, fines for non-compliance, misconfigurations, inefficient resource allocation, and the need for specialized consulting firms. To prevent or mitigate infrastructure drift, organizations should implement shift-left mechanisms, policy as code, RBAC enforcement, custom inputs, blueprints, contexts, and cloud integrations. Spacelift offers a drift detection and remediation mechanism that can be easily leveraged to overcome these issues.