Infrastructure as Code (IaC) represents a fundamental shift in how modern organizations manage their digital infrastructure. Successful IaC deployment can help with easy server configuration, efficient network handling, and protected data center operations. However, misconfigured IaC can expose infrastructure and cloud resources to security threats. IaC scanning, therefore, needs to be an essential part of security strategy, especially when it comes to cloud security. Major security vendors are coming up with exclusive solutions and features for IaC security with a particular focus on IaC scanning. In this blog, we will discuss the top 10 IaC scanning tools that stand out and see how they can help us ensure secure infrastructures for innovative digital solutions.
What is IaC Scanning?
IaC scanning is a process of thoroughly analyzing the IaC configurations for any errors or vulnerabilities that could compromise critical cloud and data resources. The configuration errors can range from loosely encrypted databases to hardcoded secrets to unaudited API integrations. The more proactive and detailed the scanning, the less likely it is for any IaC vulnerabilities to escape.
Need for IaC Scanning Tools
A recent survey suggested that more than half of breach incidents have been a direct result of misconfiguration by human coders. This is not surprising given the number of safety policies, regulation compliance, and security patches that need to be handled on a regular basis. Managing multi-cloud infrastructure manually presents significant challenges for security administrators. IaC scanning tools leverage AI and data analytics to manage these complex requirements while proactively acting against any vulnerable portions of the IaC.
IaC Scanning Tools Landscape in 2025
The emergence of DevOps, AI, data analytics, and other such technologies and frameworks has enabled a lot of security vendors to come up with offerings for IaC scanning. Businesses across industries in 2024 can leverage these tools to protect their infrastructures. Let us have a look at the most reliable and sought-after IaC scanning tools for this year:
#1 SentinelOne Singularity™ Cloud Security
Singularity™ Cloud Security provides comprehensive cloud protection through real-time CNAPP capabilities, with IaC scanning as a core component. The tool makes sure that the scanning is integrated with the CI/CD pipelines so that any vulnerabilities can be identified and dealt with during the SDLC. The tool is capable of scanning IaC policies and configurations in all the popular IaC platforms, including Azure ARM, AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, and more, for any exploitable deviations. IaC security is an inherent part of the offerings by Singularity™, and security admins can use the tools for custom scanning rules as well.
Platform at a Glance
Singularity™ Cloud Security reflects SentinelOne’s commitment to offering hassle-free cloud-native security in a one-stop integrated platform. Its customizable features for IaC security are cost-optimized and at par with proactive measures against the latest cyber threats. The platform, known for its comprehensive and integrated security offerings, brings AI-powered features for continuous IaC monitoring and workload protection. Its runtime threat intelligence protects all kinds of workloads, including containers, databases, virtual machines, and cloud deployments.
Features:
SentinelOne’s platform stands out with capabilities specifically designed for modern cloud environments:
- Zero-kernel dependencies allow easy scanning of IaC templates across different environments and architectures. This feature ensures kernel-agnostic security for companies dealing with multi-cloud environments. It is integrated with the CI/CD pipeline to ensure IaC scanning regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
- Verified Exploit Paths™ for prioritizing critical IaC misconfigurations like sketchy access controls or mishandled S3 buckets, for instance. The feature is essential for complex microservice-based and containerized environments where a more snake-eyed view of configurations is required for scanning.
- Secret scanning to ensure that any API keys or other secret data are not hard-coded within the IaC policies. All the best secret protection practices, along with API security, can be realized through this feature.
- 1000+ pre-built rules for traditional and non-traditional IaC scanning for out-of-the-box security checks. These rules are based on various compliance regulations along with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and, therefore, can take care of compliance management and standard security measures.
- Custom rules for more nuanced scanning of infrastructure configurations per the organization’s security standards. This feature is emphatically helpful for optimizing resource usage per the organization’s policies and risk assessment of proprietary IaC configurations.
Core Problems that SentinelOne Eliminates
- Configuration drift and security gaps in IaC templates
- Hard-coded secrets and credential exposure
- Compliance violations in infrastructure code
- Security bottlenecks in CI/CD pipelines
- Complex multi-cloud security management
Testimonials
As mentioned by David Cook, CISO, Sequoia Group:
“Whenever I adopt a vendor, it’s a long-term relationship with them. I chose SentinelOne core in one of our security programs. I have great visibility into what’s happening within the endpoints. Working with SentinelOne was easy in many different ways. When we did the migrations, we were able to migrate over 2500 endpoints in less than five days with no downtime on any endpoints. ”
Know more about the reviews and ratings on Singularity Cloud Security on popular spaces like Gartner Peer Insights and PeerSpot.
#2 Snyk
Snyk IaC provides comprehensive misconfiguration scanning across major IaC platforms, enabling developers to implement proactive security measures and prevent vulnerabilities before deployment.
Features:
- Extensive platform support, including Terraform, Kubernetes, and AWS CloudFormation
- Native integration with developer workflows through CLI, IDE, and CI tools
- Context-aware security recommendations
- Advanced vulnerability reporting and analytics
You can find more reviews and ratings regarding Snyk IaC on PeerSpot and G2.
#3 Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks
Prisma Cloud IaC security provides automated security validation across multiple IaC frameworks, including Helm, ARM, and serverless architectures. The tool offers a simplified UI/UX that helps developers find and fix IaC misconfigurations quickly. It also offers automation capabilities to remediate potential risks while also abiding by GitOps best practices.
Features:
- Python-based customizable security rules with multi-repository support
- Automated remediation recommendations with implementation guidance
- Advanced resource tracing capabilities
- Centralized security monitoring dashboard
- Context-aware scanning using graph-based analysis
For further information on the reviews and ratings on Prisma Cloud IaC, check out popular spaces like PeerSpot and Gartner Peer Insights.
#4 Sonatype
Sonatype implements continuous security monitoring with automated vulnerability detection and remediation capabilities. It offers actionable insights to developers to avoid misconfigurations and also makes sure relevant dependencies are managed post each fix. The automated tool makes security adoptions easy for developers with its multiple features.
Features
- Policy customization for organization-specific security requirements
- Seamless IDE integration for developer workflows
- Automated vulnerability remediation
- Integrated security controls throughout the SDLC
To learn more about the reviews and ratings on Sonatype, visit platforms like Gartner Peer Insights.
#5 Checkov
Checkov offers open-source tools for Infrastructure-as-Code vulnerability scans. The tools can help analyze cloud infrastructure for any misconfigurations before deployment. Checkov supports Kubernetes, Serverless, Terraform, and many other popular IaC frameworks with customizable scanning policies.
Features:
- Pre-deployment security validation
- Graph-based policy analysis for dependency awareness
- Native CI/CD pipeline integration
- Customizable security policy framework
#6 Trend Micro Cloud One
Trend Micro Cloud One delivers integrated infrastructure security as part of its comprehensive cybersecurity platform. Its platform helps secure cloud resources with advanced threat detection capabilities. It also helps with centralized visibility of any security vulnerabilities that come up during the scan. The platform offers numerous features to ensure maximum security coverage for resources like IaC.
Features:
- Risk management: Trend Micro brings insights about attack surfaces for the cloud resources, which helps security admins manage any potential risks. With continuous monitoring, its platform helps identify and neutralize new threats to IaC security.
- Threat intelligence: The platform leverages AI to ensure proactive threat assessment and thorough scanning policies to make sure that the infrastructure templates don’t fall prey to any misconfigurations.
- Automated security efforts: Using AI-powered actionable insights, the platform can help automate any remediations of any vulnerabilities in the IaC policies.
- Security across clouds: The platform works well with multi-cloud infrastructure for IaC security efforts.
For more information about the reviews and ratings on Trend Micro, visit G2 and Gartner Peer Insights.
#7 CheckPoint CloudGuard
CheckPoint CloudGuard provides automated IaC security validation with rapid vulnerability detection and remediation capabilities. Meant for overall cloud security, the platform offers proactive means for hunting down IaC threats, securing infrastructure deployments, and protecting CI/CD workloads among others. Cloudguard essentially offers a shift-left security posture for IaC and cloud infrastructure security.
Features:
- Rapid vulnerability identification: CloudGuard offers automation capabilities that can identify any misconfigurations in the IaC policies. It aims to catch them before they pose an exploitable vulnerability.
- Data security: The platform also helps with secrets management to ensure that all access points are sealed and all encryptions are well in place to protect critical data. It also ensures adherence to any data protection regulations.
- Identity Management: Identities and privileges can also lead to IaC vulnerabilities if not assigned properly. Cloudguard ensures such mismatched privileges are eliminated.
- Attack Mapping: For IaC security the tool also virtualizes attacks and then traces back the attack chain to root out hidden vulnerabilities in the IaC code.
You can know more about the reviews and ratings on Cloudguard by CheckPoint on popular spaces like PeerSpot and G2.
#8 Terraform Compliance
Terraform Compliance ensures infrastructure code adheres to security standards and compliance requirements pre-deployment. It ensures IaC security by offering customizable security policies that can be enforced automatically throughout the CI/CD pipeline. Its offerings for negative testing and behavior-driven development (BDD) force the deployable infrastructure to abide by predefined security policies.
Features:
- BDD capabilities: The tool’s BDD framework is one of its USPs when it comes to IaC security. It automates the way security policies are defined for IaC and empowers the security admins to test accordingly.
- Negative testing: Terraform compliance also offers negative testing that acts as an immunity wall against misconfigurations. It can help avoid weak storage encryptions over-privileged access policies, or other similar IaC vulnerabilities.
- CI/CD Integration: The tool can smoothly integrate with CI/CD pipelines to ensure scanning and eliminating security risks before IaC deployments.
- Support for multi-cloud: The tool also supports all the major cloud vendors and can ensure IaC security even in multi-cloud infrastructure.
#9 Tenable Cloud Security
Tenable Cloud Security provides integrated IaC scanning, vulnerability detection, and automated remediation capabilities. The platform is built to focus on various aspects of cloud-native security and offers multiple features for identifying and eliminating IaC errors. Working across the SDLC, Tenable also helps secure CI/CD workflows that can lead to configuration errors before the infrastructure is deployed.
Features:
- Shift-left IaC security: Offers early scanning of IaC templates that can help identify and remediate any configuration-related vulnerabilities or weak security measures. The developer-friendly platform offers this security scan along with the development workloads.
- Built-in auto fixes: Tenable offers automated remediation measures by virtue of its pre-built responses. It can help rectify a lot of misconfigurations without needing manual intervention.
- Agentless compliance: The platform can help security admins maintain adherence to all necessary regulations, including the GDPR, PCI-DSS, and more.
Learn more about Tenable Cloud Security’s reviews and ratings on popular spaces like G2 and Gartner Peer Insights.
#10 KICS by Checkmarx
Description
KICS (Keeping Infrastructure as Code Secure) by Checkmarx delivers open-source IaC security scanning with enterprise-grade capabilities. The tool offers rapid IaC scanning with automated threat detection and fixing. KICS is compatible with all the major IaC templates including Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes, and more. The tools ensure easy and end-to-end integration with CI/CD workflows to ensure rectified IaC security posture before deployments.
Features:
- Support for popular IaC frameworks: The open-source tool by Checkmarx supports all popular frameworks including Kubernetes, AWS, Ansible, Terraform, and more.
- Easy Installation: KICS can be rapidly installed using suitable package managers and can easily integrate with the CI/CD resources.
- Customizable offerings: The IaC scanning policies developed using KICS are customizable for any contextualized security scanning in the IaC templates.
How to Choose the Right IaC Scanning Tool?
Choosing the right IaC scanning tool for your digital ecosystem requires adherence to all the best practices that make sense for your IaC security. Here are some checks you can have to pick the tool most suitable for your needs:
- Support for all popular IaC platforms and frameworks, including Ansible, Kubernetes, Terraform, and more
- Automated offerings that can rapidly detect IaC misconfigurations and implement possible remediations
- A large number of scanning rules that can take care of all the possible security gaps in IaC configurations
- Customizable rules that can ensure contextualized scanning and priority vulnerability detection as per the organization’s security standards
- Adherence to regulatory compliance
- Developer-friendly features to ensure continuous scanning without requiring the developer to switch windows
- Centralized dashboard for any security deviations in IaC configuration
Conclusion
The tools evaluated in this analysis represent advanced IaC security technology, each bringing unique strengths to address specific security challenges. However, the increasing complexity of cloud infrastructure and the sophistication of modern threats demand a comprehensive, integrated approach to IaC security.
Organizations must look beyond basic scanning capabilities and consider solutions that offer:
- Comprehensive security coverage across multiple cloud providers
- Advanced threat detection and automated remediation
- Seamless integration with existing DevOps workflows
- Robust compliance monitoring and reporting
- Scalability to support growing infrastructure needs
Ready to transform your approach to IaC security? Experience the power of AI-driven infrastructure security with Singularity™ Cloud Security. Schedule a demo today to see how SentinelOne can help protect your infrastructure from development to deployment.
FAQs
1. What is IaC?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a methodology that manages and provisions computing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files rather than physical hardware configuration or manual processes. It enables organizations to automate infrastructure deployment, ensure consistency, and treat infrastructure configuration like software development.
2. What is IaC scanning?
IaC scanning is an automated security process that analyzes infrastructure code for:
- Security misconfigurations
- Compliance violations
- Best practice deviations
- Potential vulnerabilities
- Hard-coded secrets
- Access control issues
The process helps identify and remediate security risks before infrastructure deployment.
3. What is the difference between IaC and SAST?
- Scope: IaC scanning focuses specifically on infrastructure configuration code and security policies, while Static Application Security Testing (SAST) analyzes application source code for security vulnerabilities
- Target: IaC scanning examines infrastructure definitions (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation), while SAST examines application code (e.g., Java, Python)
- Vulnerabilities: IaC scanning looks for misconfigurations and policy violations, while SAST identifies coding vulnerabilities like SQL injection or buffer overflows
4. What are the best IaC scanning tools?
The best IaC scanning tools include Singularity™ Cloud Security, Snyk IaC, and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto among others that can help with rapid IaC scanning and easy remediations.
5. How does IaC work?
IaC operates through:
- Definition Files: Infrastructure specifications written in machine-readable formats
- Automation: Automated processes that interpret and execute these definitions
- Version Control: Infrastructure configurations managed like software code
- Declarative Approach: Specifying desired infrastructure state
- Idempotency: Consistent results regardless of the starting state
- API Integration: Communication with cloud providers and infrastructure services
6. Benefits of IaC Scanning?
- Proactive Security: Identifies vulnerabilities before deployment
- Compliance Assurance: Ensures adherence to security standards and regulations
- Cost Efficiency: Prevents costly post-deployment fixes
- Consistency: Maintains security standards across infrastructure
- Automation: Reduces manual security review effort
- Risk Reduction: Minimizes human error in security configurations
- Scalability: Enables secure infrastructure growth
- Development Integration: Shifts security left in the development cycle