This article will be published on 2026-12-10.
Most organizations acknowledge the existence of drift but treat it as an operational nuisance — something that happens occasionally due to human error or missing documentation.
In reality, drift is not an exception.
It is the natural state of long-lived systems.
Drift is what happens when a system evolves faster than its declared intent, its documentation and its automation can keep up. And it happens everywhere, across all layers — configuration, code, defaults, deployments, environments, processes and organizational structures.
This article explains why drift is inevitable, where it originates, how it spreads, and why it cannot be eliminated — only observed, constrained and understood.