Everything was running smoothly—until it wasn't. A critical service went offline, and as your DevOps team scrambled to investigate, the culprit wasn't infrastructure or code.
It was a misconfigured IAM permission. One that no one had touched—at least not intentionally.
This is IAM Drift. And it's quietly undermining the integrity of your cloud environment.
How IAM Drift Creeps In
In fast-moving cloud environments, IAM policies evolve constantly. New roles, new users, third-party tools—everyone needs access to something. And somewhere along the way, a policy is updated manually or inherited across accounts without review.
Before long, you're looking at:
Shadow Permissions
Over-provisioned access or lingering test credentials leave your cloud open to misuse—intentional or not. It's a compliance and security nightmare waiting to happen.
Forgotten Access Rights
Employees who've left or switched roles still have permissions they don't need. These stale credentials fly under the radar and expose sensitive data or critical operations.
Manual Drift
When cloud admins make one-off edits directly in the console—without syncing those changes back into Terraform or your IaC baseline—it creates divergence that's hard to detect and harder to reverse.
Why It's a Real Business Risk
IAM Drift doesn't announce itself with loud alerts. It's silent, subtle, and accumulates over time. But the consequences aren't subtle:
- Security holes that open your cloud to breaches
- Audit failures from non-compliant configurations
- Operational chaos when least privilege principles are violated
One misaligned permission can give access to the wrong resource—triggering data exposure, service downtime, or financial loss.
Cloudshot Detects Drift Before It Becomes Disaster
Cloudshot provides real-time, visual IAM drift detection across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Unlike static policy checkers, it continuously maps your live environment and compares it with your intended state—flagging unauthorized or unintended changes before they spiral.
Real-Time Drift Detection
See visual deviations from your baseline in seconds—across roles, users, and policies.
Role-Based Dashboards
Get security visibility by team, project, or region. Cloud architects, CISOs, and DevOps leads each see what matters most to them.
Terraform Sync Support
Automatically detect and reconcile changes made outside of your codebase—bringing you back to compliance without guesswork.
A Real Case: How a FinTech Firm Avoided a Costly Breach
One of our customers, a fast-scaling FinTech startup, discovered that a junior developer had unintentionally inherited admin rights across multiple environments due to a nested role misconfiguration. It was Cloudshot's drift visualizer that caught the anomaly. They fixed it in minutes—preventing what could've been a catastrophic data access event just days before an investor audit.
Don't Let IAM Drift Drain Your Confidence
In modern cloud environments, your IAM is your perimeter. But that perimeter shifts, drifts, and gets messy fast. Cloudshot gives you the clarity to control it—before things slip.
Before IAM Drift triggers your next breach or audit failure—see it coming.