Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) is a software-based approach to managing user and application rights, permissions, and access privileges in an organisation’s cloud environments.
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As organisations have grown increasingly dependent on cloud infrastructure and applications, managing user rights, privileges, and permissions has become critical to cybersecurity.
Most cloud servers have limited, traditional identity and access management (IAM) capabilities that aren’t well suited to the scale, complexity, and dynamic nature of cloud environments. Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) helps close the gaps—especially for multi-cloud environments that pose particular challenges for traditional access management solutions.
A key advantage of CIEM is that it enables security teams to enforce least-privilege access models, reducing the all-too-common risks associated with excessive permissions. The least-privilege approach limits user access to resources and infrastructure to the minimum needed to complete a given task, in line with the principles of zero-trust security. CIEM makes least-privilege access enforceable by simplifying the monitoring and tracking of user identities in cloud environments.
How does CIEM work?
CIEM automates the setup and enforcement of identity rules and security policies in enterprise cloud environments. CIEM software scans for existing permissions, records who is using them—both humans and machines—and adjusts access privileges as needed to ensure they align with company policies. These adjustments can be automated (typically the case in large-scale environments) or made by security teams when notified by CIEM alerts.
CIEM tools are sophisticated and use machine learning and analytics to understand and monitor access policies and how they are applied in cloud environments. This means CIEM tools can do more than just ensure permissions are assigned correctly (i.e., that they comply with company policies). They can also monitor user behavior and notify security teams of any anomalies or potential breaches. By serving both functions, CIEM provides strong and comprehensive security for companies across cloud platforms.
Key features of most CIEM solutions include:
- Continuous monitoring: CIEM tools are always active, scanning cloud environments to monitor data access and use. CIEM systems can track updates to company policies in real time and ensure that each cloud user’s privileges and permissions accord with those policies—either adjusting automatically or flagging violations for security teams to assess and address.
- Multi-cloud management: CIEM software can manage security across multiple cloud environments at the same time in a centralised way, eliminating the need for security teams to deploy multiple parallel systems to track permissions in different environments.
- Automated updates: Organisations can use CIEM tools to track and assess potential new risks to their cloud environments as they emerge and adjust and update policies automatically. If preferred, security teams can rely on CIEM to monitor and issue alerts about policy changes or non-compliant permissions and manually make updates themselves.
How is CIEM different from other identity management solutions?
Traditional identity management tools and approaches include identity access management (IAM), privileged access managed (PAM). and cloud security posture management (CSPM).
IAM is similar to CIEM in that both manage digital identities and control access to systems and data. IAM provides foundational capabilities such as user authentication, authorisation, and role-based access control across an organisation. CIEM builds upon IAM by offering deeper, cloud-native visibility into entitlements, detecting misconfigurations and excessive permissions, and automating remediation actions. While IAM is essential for managing identities, it often lacks the granular insight and automation required for complex, multi-cloud environments—gaps that CIEM tools are specifically designed to address.
PAM tools verify user identities before granting digital passwords to allow access to privileged data. PAM solutions were designed for on-premises servers, while CIEM is purpose-built for the cloud. CIEM can provide similar functions to PAM, but with more detail, automation, and ease.
CSPM monitors cloud configurations and settings and ensures cloud resources are used correctly and in a compliant way. CIEM complements CSPM by providing identity and entitlement management to go along with CSPM’s configuration management. Both contribute to a strong cloud security posture.
How does CIEM simplify cloud security?
Cloud environments are highly dynamic and involve resources that are often outside an organisation’s direct control, including infrastructure, platforms, and software operated by third-party cloud providers. That ‘multi-party’ nature of cloud environments has led to the establishment of shared responsibility approaches to cloud security, meaning providers and enterprise clients each have a role to play in keeping cloud environments secure.
Since users originate with the enterprise and their privileges and permissions are mainly the concern of the enterprise, CIEM is an essential tool that allows organisations to fulfill an important part of their shared cloud security responsibilities.
Cloud service providers do also have their own tools for granting and managing permissions. These are typically unique to each cloud platform or service, making them complicated for organisations to track and monitor, especially at scale or across multiple cloud environments.
Relying just on cloud providers’ own tools without effective cloud infrastructure entitlement management, organisations can struggle with:
- Difficulty monitoring and managing access and permissions over multi-cloud systems
- Excessive permissions—granted accidentally or potentially obtained maliciously—that allow a given user or device to access resources or functions that should be restricted
- Insufficient monitoring of privileged information, leading to potential sharing or misuse
- Lack of visibility, making it hard to ensure user compliance to company policies
- Inconsistent practices across multiple cloud environments leading to omissions and inefficient management
CIEM, on the other hand, provides centralised visibility of all users across all cloud systems so security teams can track and adjust permissions all in one place, making it easier to avoid oversights, inconsistencies, compliance failures, or breaches. Using CIEM tools, security teams can implement cloud security policies much more efficiently and effectively.
What are the benefits of CIEM?
Deploying a cloud infrastructure entitlement management solution has many benefits, including:
- More cloud visibility. Especially in multi-cloud environments, users and devices may be continuously accessing applications, stored data, platforms, and other tools distributed across different cloud resources (and different clouds). CIEM makes this activity easy to track. Many solutions provide a single console for viewing the entire environment, radically reducing complexity for security teams that are tasked with keeping cloud systems secure.
- Better control over cloud resources. By streamlining management to a single CIEM system, IT and security teams can centrally assign and limit access permissions and privileges on a user-by-user basis. This not only saves time—freeing up security personnel for other critical tasks—but also reduces the risk of errors, non-compliance with cloud security policies, misuse of cloud assets, and deliberate breaches of the enterprise cloud environment.
- Active risk management. Continuous, automated monitoring and enforcement of cloud identities, access permissions, and privileges gives security teams greater insight into the real-time state of security across multiple cloud environments so they can manage risk more actively and effectively.
- More confident regulatory compliance. Beyond enforcing corporate policies related to cloud security and permissions, CIEM solutions give security teams a boost in ensuring their organisations stay in compliance with applicable laws and regulations as well. Many organisations have requirements to protect private and confidential information that are difficult to uphold in multi-cloud scenarios. CIEM changes that.
What to think about when choosing a CIEM solution
Before implementing a cloud infrastructure entitlement management system, organisations should consider their needs related to the following:
- Multi-cloud capabilities. While identity management across multiple cloud environments is a selling point of CIEM generally, different solutions have different capabilities. It’s important to choose a solution that meets the organisation’s specific multi-cloud needs.
- Granularity. Some CIEM solutions can see more deeply into access privileges and permissions than others, down to the level of logs, data assets, and individual cloud resources. Organisations should choose a solution that can provide the level of detail they need to manage risk effectively.
- Analytics. To continually improve their overall cloud security posture, organisations should ideally benefit from the availability of analytics that can identify patterns and expose anomalies by establishing an understanding of typical cloud user behaviors and keeping that model up to date.
Where can I get help with cloud infrastructure entitlement management?
Trend Vision One™ Cloud Security provides full CIEM capabilities for organisations whether they rely on a single cloud platform or have multi-cloud or hybrid environments. Cloud Security combines deep visibility with continuous monitoring, risk assessment and exposure management capabilities, and more—providing a comprehensive solution for overall cloud security including CIEM. Learn more about how our Cloud Security can help you keep your cloud assets secure.
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