What are the compliance challenges of IaaS?

Compliance challenges in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) stem from the shared responsibility model, data governance complexities, and the dynamic nature of cloud environments. While IaaS providers manage the physical infrastructure, customers remain accountable for securing their data, configurations, and applications. This division creates gaps where compliance requirements—such as data privacy laws, industry standards, or regional regulations—can easily be overlooked if responsibilities aren’t clearly understood and implemented.

A major challenge is ensuring data residency and sovereignty. Regulations like GDPR (Europe) or CCPA (California) require data to be stored and processed in specific geographic locations. For example, a developer deploying a workload on a cloud provider might accidentally select a region outside compliant boundaries if the provider’s tools don’t enforce location restrictions by default. Even if the provider offers region-specific services, misconfigured backups or replication features could inadvertently copy data to non-compliant zones. Developers must implement strict access controls, encryption, and monitoring to track data flows, which adds complexity to deployment pipelines and infrastructure-as-code templates.

Another issue is maintaining audit readiness. Compliance frameworks like HIPAA (healthcare) or PCI DSS (payment processing) require detailed logs of access, changes, and security incidents. While IaaS platforms provide logging tools (e.g., AWS CloudTrail or Azure Monitor), correlating these logs with application-level events and ensuring they meet retention policies requires custom integration. For instance, auto-scaling instances might spin up temporary resources that aren’t logged consistently, creating gaps in audit trails. Developers often need to build additional automation to enforce policies, such as tagging resources for tracking or automatically disabling non-compliant configurations.

Lastly, third-party risk management complicates compliance. Even if a cloud provider is certified for standards like ISO 27001, customers must validate that their own use of the service aligns with those certifications. A developer might assume a provider’s SOC 2 report covers their application, but if the application stores encryption keys improperly or fails to patch vulnerabilities, compliance gaps persist. Regular audits, penetration testing, and infrastructure drift detection become critical, but these processes are time-consuming and require expertise often outside a typical developer’s scope. Without clear processes, teams risk non-compliance due to misconfigurations or outdated dependencies in their IaaS environment.