What is CIEM?
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a security approach that provides unified visibility and control over identities and permissions across multi-cloud environments. It addresses the complexity that arises when organizations use multiple cloud providers, each with its own IAM systems.
CIEM unifies identity management, entitlement authorization, and continuous monitoring into a single framework. This centralized approach prevents the coverage gaps and policy inconsistencies that commonly occur when managing cloud access through separate, provider-specific tools. A Deloitte study highlights the urgency of this oversight, noting that a lack of proper governance for role-based access contributes to 33% of cloud infrastructure attacks.
Using CIEM ensures that only correctly entitled identities can interact with your accounts. A cloud entitlement is a set of permissions granted to an identity that allows access to a logical group of resources. The permissions that are part of an entitlement can span multiple providers in a multi-cloud environment, such as an Azure virtual machine that serves an app and an AWS S3 bucket that stores related files.
CIEM's benefits
Centralized management: CIEM provides a single destination for managing all your identities and entitlements. This centralized control reduces the risk of configuration errors or oversights.
Support for multi-cloud environments: CIEM allows you to cohesively manage access controls for all your cloud providers, without manually applying policies to each one. You can use a single CIEM solution to keep accounts synced across clouds, ensuring full protection while minimizing administrative overheads.
Provides visibility: CIEM solutions analyze access activity, detect anomalous behavior, and uncover potential weaknesses in your cloud access controls.
Supports compliance and governance: Because CIEM works across all your environments, it makes it easier to enforce compliance policies and maintain continual governance of identities.
How CIEM supports cloud security
CIEM allows you to reliably enforce complex multi-cloud access policies, which reduces your attack surface and helps prevent over-privileged accounts. It also supports identity governance and compliance requirements by providing detailed visibility into identity usage and integrating with native access management layers built into each cloud. By connecting to these existing systems, CIEM solutions monitor access activity and reveal the full scope of entitlements held by your identities, even when you're working with several identity providers and cloud accounts.
Using CIEM as part of your cloud security solution restricts all identities to the specific access levels they require based on their granted entitlements. Because CIEM is purpose-built for the cloud, it's robust enough to support fast-paced changes as cloud accounts, resources, and identities are added and removed.
What is IAM?
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a framework that controls which users and systems can access specific resources within an organization's IT infrastructure. It handles both authentication and authorization.
IAM systems work by assigning granular permissions to identities and enforcing those permissions whenever access is requested. When an entity attempts to access a resource, the IAM system first verifies their identity and then checks whether they have the necessary permissions to perform that action.
IAM is a generalized approach to access management that's applicable to many different IT security scenarios, not just the cloud. Because most platforms include their own IAM implementations—such as AWS IAM and Google Cloud IAM—coverage gaps frequently surface when organizations use multiple identity providers and permission sets. This makes it challenging to consistently enforce IAM security policies at scale.
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IAM's benefits
Policy-based access management: IAM solutions allow you to configure rule-based policies that define who can access your resources and how, such as restricting specific S3 buckets to authorized users. This simplifies configuration and enhances auditability.
Granular permission controls: IAM assigns a distinct permission to every action supported by a resource. You can configure your identities with the minimum permissions they require for their roles, which prevents accounts from becoming over-privileged.
Enforcement of identity requirements: Utilizing IAM gives you control over your identities and how they interact with your systems, such as requiring multi-factor authentication (MFA) and a known device. Microsoft Entra ID allows you to enforce MFA by activating a global policy within its admin center, while the AWS IAM Identity Center provides multiple options for controlling MFA requirements.
Secured perimeters: IAM systems define a clear perimeter for your networks and resources. All access attempts flow through the IAM solution, making it harder for attackers to reach sensitive services.
How IAM supports cloud security
IAM is a fundamental pillar of cloud security. Authenticating identities and authorizing access to resources are critical tasks IAM solves through proven frameworks.
Defining identities within an IAM solution and assigning granular permission policies allows you to safely access secure resources without authenticating as a privileged account. By using IAM, you can create precisely scoped identities with only the minimum permissions they need, reducing the risk of identity compromise. IAM also makes it harder to execute attacks against identities by enforcing authentication requirements and providing visibility into access attempts. For example, IAM tools typically integrate with cloud provider audit tools, like Google Cloud Audit Logs and AWS CloudTrail, to generate detailed logs for each access event.
Comparing CIEM and IAM
The fundamental difference between CIEM and IAM lies in their scope and specialization. IAM provides broad identity management across all IT infrastructure, while CIEM focuses specifically on cloud environments and multi-cloud complexity.
Both approaches share common capabilities—they manage identities, enforce access policies, and provide monitoring. However, CIEM adds cloud-native features that traditional IAM lacks.
CIEM bridges the gaps that emerge in multi-cloud environments. It unifies different cloud provider IAM systems, detects exposed credentials across cloud services, and provides holistic risk analysis that considers cloud-specific attack vectors. This cloud-focused approach enables capabilities like detecting misconfigurations and analyzing cross-cloud permission relationships that traditional IAM systems can’t handle.
Wiz’s unified platform exemplifies how CIEM and broader cloud security work together through features like agentless scanning and risk-based prioritization.
Here's a breakdown of how CIEM and IAM compare:
| Comparison point | CIEM | IAM |
|---|---|---|
| Objective | Manage identities and entitlements across cloud environments | Manage identities and their privileges within specific environments |
| Use case | Enforce consistent identity controls for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures | Enforce identity authentication requirements and prevent unauthorized resource access |
| What it protects against | Cloud misconfigurations, coverage gaps, privilege escalation, unauthorized access, and forgotten accounts and identities | Unauthorized access and privilege escalation |
| Visibility and monitoring | Enables unified visibility across all the infrastructure providers | Offers visibility into activity associated with a specific set of identities |
| Compliance support | Maintains centralized compliance and auditability across your infrastructure, including cloud configuration requirements | Facilitates governance of identity provisioning and privilege assignment |
The Wiz Security Graph correlates identity risks with other cloud exposures, which demonstrates how a unified platform provides deeper risk analysis than siloed tools.
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Should I use CIEM or IAM?
Most organizations benefit from CIEM and IAM working together. The decision depends on your cloud architecture and complexity.
For single-cloud environments: Traditional IAM may be sufficient initially, but CIEM becomes valuable as you scale or add cloud services. Even single-cloud setups benefit from CIEM's specialized cloud risk detection and unified policy management.
For multi-cloud or hybrid environments: CIEM is essential. Without it, you face coverage gaps, policy inconsistencies, and the manual overhead of managing separate IAM systems across different cloud providers.
The complementary approach works best. Use IAM for foundational identity management and CIEM for cloud-specific challenges like cross-cloud permissions, ephemeral resource access, and unified policy enforcement.
Because each cloud platform maintains its own IAM solution, misconfigurations can easily arise when you manually manage IAM identities and policies in multi-cloud environments. CIEM addresses this issue by providing centralized visibility and control over identities across all your cloud infrastructure and resources, including ephemeral endpoints like containers and serverless functions.
Including CIEM in your cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) helps mitigate the risks from over-privileged, forgotten, or compromised identities.
Unify Your CIEM and IAM Strategy with Wiz
Wiz doesn't treat CIEM as an isolated product. Instead, CIEM capabilities are natively built right into our CNAPP.
By bringing CIEM and IAM together, Wiz gives you agentless visibility into both explicit and effective permissions across your entire multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and SaaS environments (including Snowflake, GitHub, and Kubernetes).
Here is how Wiz makes managing cloud identity and access a breeze:
Map the full attack path: Wiz correlates identity risks with other cloud vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. This gives you the full context you need to visualize lateral movement paths and stop them before they start.
Proactively fix IAM blindspots: Easily uncover critical issues like inactive admin accounts and over-privileged users. Wiz provides guided remediation and access path visualizations so you can right-size privileges and confidently enforce least privilege.
Govern from one place: Keep track of who has access to what using a centralized Identity Inventory. Explore entitlements, manage custom identity policies, and keep compliance frameworks (like FedRAMP and FISMA) on track.
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Discover how the Security Graph connects identity risks with cloud exposures for complete visibility.
