What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management?
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a security discipline that discovers, analyzes, and governs identity permissions across cloud environments. CIEM platforms automatically map who has access to what cloud resources, identify over-privileged accounts, and enforce least-privilege policies to prevent unauthorized access and reduce breach risk, a critical function considering that credential misuse contributes to 61% of breaches.
Cloud entitlements are permissions given to a cloud identity, which can be a human, machine, or service account. They define which cloud applications a cloud user can access. It's important to manage these privileges, because cloud identities with suboptimal, redundant, or dated privileges pose a variety of security risks.
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Why CIEM must be part of your cloud security
CIEM addresses critical cloud identity risks by providing centralized control over permissions and access rights across all cloud platforms. Here's how CIEM strengthens your security posture:
Complete visibility: Discover all identities, accounts, and machines with cloud access across multi-cloud environments
Attack surface reduction: Identify and eliminate unauthorized, excessive, or unnecessary access permissions
Breach prevention: Stop data breaches caused by identity misconfigurations before they occur
Compliance automation: Continuously monitor and audit entitlements to meet regulatory requirements
How does CIEM work?
This Wiz Tech Talk shares insight on cloud entitlements: identity, fragmentation, policies, governance, and recommendations.
CIEM platforms deliver four core capabilities that transform how organizations secure cloud identities and permissions. These capabilities work together to provide comprehensive identity risk management across your entire cloud infrastructure.
1. Analyzing effective access
Effective access analysis reveals exactly who can access which cloud resources and through what permissions. CIEM platforms map all identities and their actual access rights across multi-cloud environments. This includes analyzing complex permission structures like AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs) and Azure Management Groups to show real-world access capabilities, not just assigned permissions.
2. Right-sizing permissions
CIEM can automatically monitor cloud identities and right-size permissions based on least privilege policies. Right-sized permissions can significantly strengthen cloud security, reduce an organization’s attack surface, streamline access for legitimate users, and ensure that cloud identities aren’t a viable attack vector for threat actors.
3. Detecting accidental exposure
Accidental exposure detection identifies when cloud permissions or credentials are unintentionally made public or overly accessible. CIEM platforms continuously scan for exposed access keys, misconfigured roles, and publicly accessible resources. This prevents attackers from exploiting leaked credentials to hijack identities, move laterally through cloud infrastructure, and steal sensitive data.
4. Generating remediation recommendations
CIEM can do more than just detect accidental exposures. It can also provide granular recommendations that enable teams to follow step-by-step remediation actions to right-size access and revoke unused or excessive permissions. Guided remediation capabilities can help organizations address identity-related security vulnerabilities and incidents before serious damage is caused.
What challenges does CIEM help address?
CIEM solves five critical cloud identity challenges that plague modern enterprises:
Over-Privileged Access: CIEM solutions can identify overly permissive access, ensuring that users and services have only the minimum required privileges, and reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
Identity Proliferation: With the rise of cloud services and automation, organizations often struggle to manage the sheer number of identities, including users, service accounts, and automated processes, which can lead to situations where 15% of resources in a tech stack go unaccessed for 90 days. CIEM helps centralize and manage these identities, making it easier to handle access control.
Lack of Visibility: Organizations often lack a comprehensive view of who has access to what resources. CIEM tools provide visibility into access patterns and entitlements across the cloud environment, helping organizations understand their access landscape.
Complexity of Multi-Cloud Environments: Many organizations use multiple cloud providers, leading to complex and inconsistent access control policies. CIEM can help unify access management across different cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Azure) ensuring consistent and centralized access control.
Compliance Requirements: Organizations need to comply with various regulations and standards that require specific access controls and auditing capabilities. CIEM solutions provide audit trails, reporting, and policy enforcement to help organizations meet their compliance requirements.
How CIEM improves your identity security strategy
CIEM strengthens seven core areas of your cloud security strategy by embedding identity governance throughout your infrastructure. Here's how CIEM enhances each strategic component:
| Strategic Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Identity and Access Management (IAM) | CIEM provides fine-grained control over who has access to your cloud resources and what actions they can perform. By centralizing access management, you can ensure only authorized users and applications can access sensitive data and services. |
| Least Privilege Principle | CIEM solutions help enforce the principle of least privilege by ensuring that users and applications only have the minimum level of access needed to perform their tasks. By minimizing access rights, you reduce the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches. |
| Visibility and Auditing | CIEM tools offer visibility into user activity and resource access in your cloud environments across all cloud providers. They can help detect abnormal or suspicious activities and provide audit trails for compliance purposes. |
| Policy Enforcement | CIEM allows you to define, enforce, and automate security policies across your cloud environment. These policies can be based on factors such as user roles, geography, time, and more. |
| Automated Remediation | CIEM can automatically generate recommendations that allow teams to follow guided remediation steps to reduce access and revoke unused permissions. |
| Compliance | By providing visibility, control, and auditing capabilities, CIEM can help organizations comply with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. |
| Privileged Access Management (PAM) | PAM benefits from CIEM's insights into cloud entitlements to identify risky behaviors and potential compromise of privileged accounts. |
See Why Wiz Leads in CNAPP—and CIEM
The latest G2 CNAPP Report names Wiz the #1 platform for securing the cloud—from configurations to identity access. Download the report to see how Wiz powers modern CIEM strategies and more.
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CIEM security benefits
CIEM delivers four measurable security improvements that transform how organizations manage cloud access risks. These benefits directly impact your security effectiveness and operational efficiency:
1. Enhanced visibility
CIEM enriches businesses with thorough visibility into entitlements and identities across multi-cloud environments. It helps enterprises understand what resources their various users have access to. The critical capability of CIEM is that it provides a centralized console from which businesses can surveil and manage cloud entitlements and privilege policies. Enhanced visibility will help enterprises weed out redundant, dormant, and overprivileged digital identities.
2. Robust security posture
The enforcement of the principle of least privilege ensures that digital identities have streamlined access to the cloud resources that are vital to their tasks. It also ensures that cloud identities have no additional cloud entitlements—both in terms of actions and access—beyond what they need to perform their essential tasks.
3. Improved compliance
Organizations must comply with specific industry standards and regulations in order to operate in the cloud. CIEM can help companies stay compliant with a range of region- and industry-specific regulators including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and FedRAMP. Automated CIEM mechanisms can help enterprises identify and remediate identity-related risks in quick time, which can help enterprises avoid legal fines and other penalties. CIEM can also enhance an organization’s audit readiness.
4. Detection and remediation of identity-related risks
Digital identities can carry a range of risks, including unnecessary privileges, outdated permissions, and misconfigurations that may lead to accidental public exposure. The best CIEM solutions can automatically detect, prioritize, and remediate these identity-related risks, which can help enterprises avoid major financial and operational setbacks.
How CIEM works with CNAPP
Traditionally, CIEM has been a siloed cloud security solution, but more recently organizations are realizing the power of unifying it with other cloud security solutions. CNAPP
Integrating CIEM as a part of a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) provides a more comprehensive and holistic security solution for cloud-native applications.
CIEM focuses on managing and monitoring access permissions, ensuring that only authorized entities have the necessary entitlements
CNAPP covers all aspects of cloud-native application security, including container security, cloud security posture management (CSPM), and cloud workload protection (CWPP).
By combining these approaches, organizations can enhance visibility into their environments, streamline security operations, and make it easier to identify potential security threats – ultimately achieving a more complete and consistent security posture for their cloud-native applications.
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Control cloud entitlements with Wiz
Wiz makes CIEM easy by using cloud provider APIs to give full visibility across your cloud environment, including identities, permissions, and effective access.
Identity components such as users, service accounts, roles, groups, and policies are standardized across cloud providers, providing you a unified and easy to parse view.
You can keep multi-cloud environments secure, manage identities and permissions, and automatically find and fix risky configurations without getting bogged down in complexities. See it firsthand with a demo.
Wiz’s demo is an easy way for organizations to see firsthand the benefits of unifying CIEM with other cloud security solutions into a CNAPP.
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