Cloud identities are a frequent target in many intrusion scenarios. Every service account, federated user, and cross-account role in your environment represents potential lateral movement opportunities for attackers who've already gained initial access.
According to IBM's 2025 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, identity-based attacks now comprise 30% of all intrusions, fueled by an 84% surge in infostealer malware campaigns. Manual reviews that worked in smaller environments often become impractical at larger scale.
Cost considerations often extend beyond breach impact to include compliance effort, development delays related to security controls, and engineering time spent on access reviews.
Across the globe, organizations are discovering that the traditional approach of "grant first, audit later" can create elevated risk in cloud environments.. And to that end, cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) is increasingly adopted by organizations running workloads in the cloud.
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CIEM vs. IAM
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management represents a shift in how identity security is approached in the cloud. AM systems traditionally focus on governing access through policies and authentication. CIEM analyzes and enforces least privilege at scale by understanding the effective permissions of every identity in your environment.
Traditional IAM was designed for relatively static, on-premises environments where identities were primarily human users. But today's cloud environments are heavily dominated by non-human identities that can number in the thousands, like service accounts, lambda functions, container workloads, and cross-account roles. And these non-human identities often inherit permissions through complex chains of group memberships, resource policies, and trust relationships that can make manual analysis difficult to scale.
While IAM governs who can access what through policies and authentication mechanisms, CIEM analyzes potential blast radius for identities. It maps out toxic permission combinations, tracks dormant identities, and identifies privilege escalation paths that could be exploited by attackers who've already gained initial access.
The 3 pillars of effective CIEM
The CIEM market has matured rapidly, so platform capabilities vary across the market. Adoption and impact often depend on a few core capabilities:
1. Visibility & context
The foundation of any effective CIEM strategy starts with broad visibility into identities across the environment. This means mapping not just the obvious human users and service accounts, but also federated users from external identity providers, cross-account roles that span organizational boundaries, temporary tokens generated by CI/CD pipelines, and service principals that power your workloads.
CIEM platforms achieve this through agentless discovery across major cloud environments, avoiding per-workload software installation. The breakthrough comes with graph-based analytics that map not just individual permissions, but the complex inheritance chains and role relationships that determine what each identity can actually access.
Critical capabilities in this pillar include…
Identifying unused or overly broad permissions across human and machine identities
Mapping complex permission inheritance chains across roles, groups, and trust relationships
Visualizing access paths to sensitive resources across accounts and clouds
Surfacing identities with broad access to public or critical assets that pose a blast radius risk
2. Risk-based prioritization
Having visibility is a great starting point. But it’s just that—a starting point. The real value comes from understanding which identity risks are actually exploitable in your specific environment. This pillar focuses on contextual risk assessment that goes much farther than simple policy analysis to understand real-world attack scenarios.
Effective risk prioritization flags toxic combinations where seemingly innocent permissions become dangerous when combined. The platform you pick should:
Highlight identities with public exposure or overly broad privileges
Prioritize risks based on blast radius and lateral movement potential
Correlate identity risks with real-time security findings like vulnerabilities or data exposure
Spot shadow admin accounts that have quietly accumulated too many privileges over time
Flag unused yet over-provisioned services that expand your attack surface
3. Remediation & governance
The third pillar transforms insights into action through automated remediation workflows that support least-privilege enforcement while considering operational impact. This includes…
Policy suggestions informed by access patterns
Context-aware recommendations intended to maintain required functionality
Integration with ticketing or remediation pipelines
Monitoring for permission drift to alert on reintroduced risk
Evaluation criteria for buyers
Wiz’s point of view is that effective CIEM goes beyond permission inventory to provide contextual risk insights. When evaluating CIEM platforms, we suggest looking for these key capabilities:
1. Agentless identity discovery across multi-cloud environments
Modern CIEM platforms offer agentless visibility into identities across AWS, Azure, and GCP, reducing installation overhead.
2. Effective permission and access path analysis
Static policy analysis isn’t enough. Solutions can determine effective permissions by analyzing trust relationships, group memberships, and inherited policies.
3. Graph-based modeling of cloud identity relationships
Many platforms are adopting graph technology to visualize how identities relate to workloads, networks, and data. This enables teams to trace potential attack paths, identify privilege escalation routes, and map toxic combinations that aren’t obvious from policy files alone.
4. Risk-based prioritization using cloud context
From Wiz’s point of view, prioritization benefits from considering exposure, sensitive data access, and potential lateral movement. Prioritization should be contextual, not just rule-based.
5. Identity threat detection and response
CIEM isn’t just about posture — it also plays a role in detection. Some platforms go further by correlating identity risks with threat activity, such as anomalous behavior, exposed secrets, or unusual API calls, to help surface potential identity threats earlier in the kill chain.
6. Least-privilege enforcement and policy remediation
Strong CIEM platforms recommend right-sizing policies based on usage data, and support least-privilege enforcement without breaking critical workflows. Look for features like policy simulation, just-in-time access workflows, and integration into ticketing or DevOps pipelines.
7. Integrated cloud risk context
Identity is one part of the puzzle. Some CIEM offerings are part of platforms that also monitor vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, data exposure, and runtime behavior — enabling a unified view of cloud risk and more accurate prioritization.
8. Lifecycle governance and drift detection
Some platforms help detect identity drift — when permissions accumulate over time — and alert on zombie accounts, stale roles, or unused service principals that expand the attack surface.
A CIEM platform’s real value lies in what it helps you do — not just what it shows you. The strongest tools combine deep entitlement visibility, contextual risk modeling, and active threat detection to reduce the attack surface and stop identity-based threats in their tracks.
7 CIEM platforms (listed in no particular order)
Now that we've established what makes a CIEM platform effective, it's time to see how the market leaders perform in practice. From cloud-native startups to enterprise security giants, each platform takes a different approach to solving the identity challenge.
Wiz
G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5 ⭐ (702 reviews)
Snapshot: Cloud-native CIEM with unified security context across infrastructure, identities, and data
Key strengths:
Graph-based attack path analysis: Maps toxic permission chains across AWS, Azure, and GCP
Agentless, multi-cloud discovery: Scans cloud environments in minutes without deploying agents, correlating identity risks with vulnerabilities, exposed secrets, and misconfigured network rules
Context-aware remediation: Auto-generates least-privilege policies while considering dependencies, like ensuring CI/CD pipelines retain necessary permissions during deployment windows
CNAPP integration: Enriches CIEM insights with workload security data, prioritizing identities that can access crown jewel resources and reside in vulnerable containers or exposed VMs
Wiz correlates identity, data, and infrastructure context. Many organizations use CIEM alongside broader cloud security data to understand why a given over-privileged identity may present higher risk.
With Wiz, identity risks aren’t just theoretical. They’re prioritized based on real exposure paths and correlated with runtime context to accelerate response.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 ⭐ (302 reviews)
Snapshot: Azure-native CIEM with growing multi-cloud support; tightly integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem
Key strengths:
Azure AD deep integration: Automatically maps Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) users to cloud roles, highlighting federated identities with excessive permissions in Azure SQL or Key Vault
Compliance-driven prioritization: Flags effective permissions violating the Microsoft cloud security benchmark (MCSB) or GDPR, with prebuilt templates for SOC 2 and NIST
Unified Microsoft 365 dashboard: Correlates CIEM alerts with Defender XDR incidents, like a service principal with broad permissions suddenly accessing SharePoint data
CyberArk Cloud Entitlements Manager (Secure Cloud Access)
G2 rating: 5 out of 5 ⭐ (5 reviews)
Snapshot: Privileged access management (PAM) leader extending governance to cloud entitlements
Key strengths:
Just-in-time (JIT) access: Grants temporary permissions for tasks like debugging production issues, avoiding standing privileges for AWS admins or Kubernetes service accounts
Policy-as-code integration: Exports least-privilege IAM policies to Terraform or CloudFormation, embedding governance into DevOps pipelines
Ermetic (now a Tenable company)
G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5 ⭐ (30 reviews)
Snapshot: Identity-first platform merging CIEM with CSPM for full-stack cloud risk analysis
Key strengths:
AWS IAM Expertise: Detects risky combinations like iam:PassRole + lambda:CreateFunction, which attackers exploit to hijack workloads
Behavioral anomaly detection: Flags dormant service accounts suddenly listing EC2 instances or accessing cross-account roles
Shift-left policy enforcement: Blocks overly permissive roles in CI/CD pipelines via GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps extensions
Post-acquisition edge: Integrates with Tenable’s exposure management platform to prioritize identities exposed via unpatched CVEs (e.g., a developer with SSH access to a vulnerable VM)
Palo Alto Prisma Cloud (now Cortex)
G2 rating: 4.1 out of 5 ⭐ (93 reviews)
Snapshot: Integrated within a broader CNAPP platform; aligns with network-centric security approaches.
Key Strengths:
Network-aware risk scoring: Prioritizes identities that can access public-facing RDS instances or modify security groups
Queryable entitlements: Uses Resource Query Language (RQL) for easy queries (for example, “Which GCP service accounts can write to BigQuery datasets tagged as PII”).
JIT access with zero standing privileges: Grants time-bound permissions via Okta or Azure AD Conditional Access policies
SailPoint Cloud Access Management
G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 ⭐ (97 reviews)
Snapshot: Identity governance veteran bringing certification workflows to cloud entitlements
Pillar coverage:
Key strengths:
Certification campaigns: Auto-generates access reviews for AWS roles or Azure resource groups, with attestation trails for auditors
Lifecycle automation: Deprovisions permissions when employees leave or projects end, reducing “zombie” service accounts
Authomize (now a Delinea company)
G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 ⭐ (1 review)
Snapshot: CIEM + SaaS identity governance for unified access reviews across cloud and apps
Key strengths:
SaaS + IaaS coverage: Correlates AWS roles with SaaS app permissions (e.g., “Does this EC2 admin also have write access to Salesforce?”)
Auto-deprovisioning: Removes stale permissions from offboarded employees across Snowflake, GitHub, and Azure AD simultaneously
Anomaly detection: Alerts when a marketing user suddenly gains “admin” rights in AWS or accesses sensitive Confluence pages
Best for: Companies managing hybrid SaaS/IaaS environments that need periodic access certifications for ISO 27001 or SOX
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