What are entitlements in cloud environments?
Cloud entitlements define what human and machine identities can access in your cloud—and exactly how they’re allowed to interact with those resources. Basically, cloud entitlements determine which entities can access what cloud resources.
If managed well, cloud entitlements drive productivity and performance by providing streamlined access to critical cloud resources. But if they’re mismanaged, cloud entitlements are a massive vulnerability and a major part of the overall attack surface. That’s why, according to IBM, 42% of security leaders are planning to invest in identity and access management (IAM) security.
Different cloud providers manage entitlements in slightly different ways:
Inline vs. managed policies in AWS
Role assignments in Azure
IAM bindings in GCP
But across all clouds, what matters most isn’t what’s assigned on paper; it’s what a given identity can actually do when all policies, inherited roles, and trust relationships are factored in. That’s what’s known as effective permissions, and that's where the real risk lies. Now that we have a handle on effective permissions, let’s zero in on a few different entitlement risks.
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Common cloud entitlement risks
Entitlement management in the cloud has a few unique hurdles that businesses need to overcome:
Privilege creep and over-permissioning: Temporary roles and one-off access grants are often forgotten and not revoked, leading to excessive privileges accumulating over time.
Dormant and orphaned identities: Inactive users and service accounts often go unmonitored, creating low-noise backdoors that attackers love to exploit.
Toxic combinations: Misconfigured IAM security policies, when combined with public access or unpatched workloads, can expose your most sensitive data.
Lateral movement and excessive trust: Over-trusted identities give attackers room to maneuver, from accessing sensitive buckets to assuming cross-account roles.
Visibility gaps: The cloud’s mix of services, providers, and policies makes it hard to visualize the full identity attack surface, let alone control it.
These risks don’t exist in isolation; they stack to create hidden attack paths that traditional IAM tools can’t see.
Must-have functions of a modern entitlement management system
Your CloudSec teams need all the help they can get to tackle entitlement risks in the cloud. The best way to support CloudSec personnel and mitigate identity risks across multi-cloud environments? Introduce a modern entitlement management system.
There are countless entitlement management solutions on the market, but not all of them are equally effective. To make the right choice, look for the following must-have features and capabilities across three focus areas: visibility, risk prioritization, and remediation workflows.
1. Complete visibility
Continuous discovery of human and machine identities
Since the cloud is constantly in flux, you need an entitlement management system that automatically discovers accounts and their corresponding access rights across your multi-cloud estate. This includes identities across ephemeral workloads, containers, applications, and VMs.
Mapping of effective permissions across clouds, services, and workloads
In the cloud, a cursory glance at assigned roles isn’t enough. You need continuous, real-time mapping of effective permissions, so you know exactly what each identity can do and reach. The more services you use from more providers, the more complex this might get, which is why it’s essential to create a comprehensive map of effective permissions.
2. Contextual risk prioritization
Business-aware scoring of entitlement risk
Certain identity risks pose a greater threat to your business than others. That’s why you need an entitlement management solution that can take into consideration a variety of deep cloud and business contexts. An account with tons of access privileges to low-value resources is barely a risk, but even the smallest attack path to mission-critical or crown jewel data is a major vulnerability.
By identifying only the highest-priority risks, your CloudSec teams can approach remediation in order of criticality instead of being bogged down by alert fatigue.
Awareness of policy misconfigurations, trust relationships, and toxic combinations
Managing identity risks in cloud environments involves factoring in numerous policies, toxic combinations, and configurations. This deep and layered context is the only way to find the truly dangerous risks in your environments. A solution that understands and synchronizes with IAM policies, trust policies, and cloud service configurations can help you map how and why certain privileges were granted—and where there's a need to dial some privileges back.
3. Built-in remediation workflows
Policy enforcement based on least privilege and zero trust
At a minimum, your entitlement management solution should include the ability to enforce policies based on zero-trust principles like least privilege, reduce excessive effective permissions wherever necessary, and get rid of dormant and outdated accounts with access rights.
Automation to right-size permissions and remove dormant accounts
Identifying identity risks is one half of the puzzle, but a comprehensive entitlement management solution needs to be able to right-size excessive privileges and reduce risks associated with dormant accounts. Most importantly, your entitlement management needs to do this automatically: There’s simply no time in the cloud for drawn-out manual processes.
How CIEM helps solve the cloud identity problem
Traditional IAM is essential for managing identities and access policies — but it wasn’t built to handle the scale and complexity of cloud entitlements. CIEM extends IAM with cloud-native discovery, context, and continuous risk reduction.
CIEM, on track to be a $7.5 billion market by 2028, extends traditional IAM security with cloud-native visibility and risk prioritization. While IAM tools define who can access what, CIEM builds on this by mapping the real-world effective permissions — what identities can actually do — across dynamic cloud environments.
CIEM employs an API-driven approach to ingesting policy and identity data across cloud environments. Using that data, a CIEM tool builds a permission graph, which is basically a map of accounts, effective permissions, and access paths. The result? Accurate identification, prioritization, and remediation of risky identities and excessive access.
But even CIEM alone isn’t enough. Entitlement risks are often tied to configuration drift, exposed workloads, and vulnerable assets, which means CIEM should ideally be a part of a broader CNAPP strategy that correlates various cloud risks.
The bottom line? Make sure CIEM is unified into a comprehensive CNAPP solution and is enriched with deep cloud and business contexts from tools like CSPM, DSPM, and vulnerability management.
The Wiz approach to entitlement management
Wiz gives you full context for your entitlement risk, tying every identity to the data, workloads, and misconfigurations it can actually reach. That’s what sets Wiz apart: Its CIEM capability is embedded into the overall cloud security platform. Zero silos.
Here’s a closer look at exactly how Wiz CIEM secures your identities:
Full, agentless visibility: Wiz provides comprehensive identity visibility across multi-cloud resources and Kubernetes. Since Wiz is agentless, there’s zero overhead—teams get better visibility without performance trade-offs.
Effective permissions at a glance: Wiz CIEM provides graph-based analysis of effective permissions and toxic combinations, allowing you to see your entire identity topology from a single pane of glass.
Unparalleled risk correlation: Wiz considers a wide variety of factors—starting with entitlements and connecting through to exposed resources and other cloud vulnerabilities—to give you an interconnected understanding of identity risks and mitigation strategies.
Automated remediation: Wiz CIEM goes far beyond detection, automating the right-sizing of permissions to eliminate excessive access and dormant risks at scale. Wiz CIEM merges with existing workflows to automatically right-size permissions, so you can say goodbye to manual and time-consuming mitigation strategies.
Ready to see what every identity in your cloud can really access—and how to fix it? Request a demo to learn how Wiz maps effective permissions, reveals toxic combinations, and helps you reduce identity risk at scale.
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