Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) Benefits
Learn about CIEM, its benefits, its role in cloud security, and more.
2025 THREAT LANDSCAPE REPORT
What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management?
Cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM) is a solution that enables organizations to manage data governance and user entitlements across their cloud environments. The CIEM concept first emerged in?, in which it was described as a specialized identity-centric Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution focused on managing cloud access risk and time-limited access controls.?
Why is CIEM Necessary? Challenges tackled by CIEM
Entitlement management is an identity governance feature that manages the privileges assigned to every user and device in an organization¡¯s cloud infrastructure. In hybrid and multi-cloud environments, solutions such as?identity access management (IAM)?and?privileged identity management (PIM)?are critical so that only authorized users can access a company's networks and applications.?
CIEM security solutions?help ensure this is the case by leveraging data analytics and machine-learning techniques to detect anomalies, manage user entitlements, and data governance. Using CIEM best practices, organizations can consistently implement stringent access controls and zero-trust policies across cloud environments.?
CIEM tools empower businesses to address issues that may arise when managing user access and entitlement, including:?
- The difficulty of monitoring and managing data governance in dynamic, global multi-cloud environments
- Information misuse from privileged user accounts
- Events that cause a lack of visibility that affects compliance?
- Short-term cloud entitlements that add complexity to entitlement management
- A lack of consistency in managing entitlements across organizations¡¯ various cloud infrastructures?
- User accounts that gain excessive levels of access permissions
Resolving these challenges is the biggest single driver of CIEM growth in the industry, especially since businesses require a more refined approach to managing IAM in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
What are the Benefits of CIEM?
CIEM solutions offer a wide range of benefits, from increasing visibility across cloud infrastructures to minimizing disruption and meeting compliance requirements.?With many CIEM vendors now emerging, CIEM solutions have become more diversified to cater to the specific needs of every company Key benefits of deploying CIEM tools include:
1. Improved productivity and innovation
CIEM tools manage issues stemming from excessive permissions whenever organizations introduce new applications and workloads.?Advanced machine-learning technology helps identify potential risks and tailor cybersecurity solutions to mitigate them. As a result, businesses can maximize productivity levels while minimizing disruptions.
2. Automation
CIEM solutions automate user permissions management¡ªincluding defining user accounts and permissions¡ªacross various cloud environments. They automatically monitor for suspicious, malicious, or unusual behavior and perform the appropriate remediation steps when anything that deviates from usual patterns is detected.?With the growth of cyber threats, identifying attack patterns and responding swiftly is mission-critical.
3. Increased visibility
CIEM solutions offer organizations enhanced visibility into resource access requests across their cloud infrastructures. This is vital to more effective permission management and meeting regulatory compliance requirements.?
4. Reduced costs
CIEM provides complete visibility into application usage. This insight enables better-informed decisions about capacity requirements, cloud subscription management, or upgrading to new cloud environments¡ªessentially making the use of cloud computing resources more cost-effective.?
5. Business continuity
With CIEM monitoring the entire infrastructure for access and entitlement anomalies, organizations are better able to avoid business disruptions.
6. Clear user roles
CIEM tools assign separate user roles, such as system administrators and IT managers. This way, IT teams can:
- Better monitor cloud resource consumption
- Ensure user access is in line with organizational policies
- Restrict user access if requests exceed permissions
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Role of CIEM in Cloud Security
Cloud entitlement is central to managing the various tools built into modern cloud systems. Using code or cloud consoles and admin interfaces, businesses can define the permissions and activities available to specific users. A?key role of CIEM is to address the limitations of the tools businesses use to define permissions, manage configurations and security policies, and ensure compliance.?
CIEM helps companies counter issues such as:
- Entitlement tracking:?Most cloud tools track entitlements via cloud providers¡¯ IAM frameworks. This means businesses could miss any entitlements assigned to other frameworks and tools that are not native to public cloud platforms, such as Kubernetes contexts.
- Limited cloud capacity:?Existing cloud tools typically operate within one cloud platform. Therefore, an organization that uses multiple cloud systems will need to track entitlements using separate tools. This increases the chances of entitlement issues being overlooked.?
CIEM addresses these challenges by finding configuration issues, providing more granular entitlement validation, and proactively monitoring entitlements that could violate the least privilege principle.?
CIEM¡¯s role in?cloud security?includes:?
- Continuous assessment:?CIEM tools continuously validate entitlements, which means they are able to detect access and configuration issues in real-time, even if the organization¡¯s policies change. For example, a CIEM tool can flag cloud accounts that only had permission to run virtual machines but have now been able to delete them. This may be a legitimate action, but could also be an unnecessary entitlement that needs to be addressed.
- Automated remediation:?CIEM tools enable businesses to automatically update their policies to address new and evolving risks. This way, they can remediate potential issues in real-time and let IT or admin teams intervene manually if needed.?
- Scalability:?Large organizations usually have hundreds or thousands of entitlements across their cloud environments. CIEM automates the process of managing large amounts of applications and dozens of user account and device types.
- Multi-cloud support:?Defining and managing cloud entitlements varies massively depending on which cloud types organizations use and the services they run in them. Every public cloud platform has a specific native IAM framework, while other cloud services like Kubernetes may use individual frameworks to define entitlements.?CIEM automatically issues alerts whenever it discovers an entitlement configuration?problem. And because it automates entitlement management across multi-cloud infrastructures, organizations do not have to manage multiple tools or access control frameworks to track entitlements.
What are CIEM Components?
What is CIEM? The primary components of a CIEM system are identity rules and security policies. These are essential to cloud infrastructure entitlement management because they govern who has access to specific clouds and workloads.
Although the typical CIEM definition focuses on the methodologies and processes behind the solution, CIEM would be incomplete without including the role a dashboard plays in system management. Using a dashboard, you can see the security policies of your organization, all visible through a single pane of glass.
By combining these components together, you can see which permissions are used for each session. You also have the ability to determine when entitlements are being abused.
Future-Proofing Your Cloud Infrastructure with CIEM Solutions
Lacework FortiCNAPP reduces cloud identity risk by knowing your users and their access, pinpointing which are riskiest, and right-sizing their entitlements. 188BET×ãÇò's CNAPP platform consolidates the following capabilities:
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Managing cloud access risks can be complex without proper entitlement controls.?Secure your cloud with 188BET×ãÇò's CNAPP platform.
CIEM FAQs
What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)?
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management, or CIEM (pronounced ¡°kim¡±), is a cloud security solution that focuses on helping organizations enforce the principle of least privilege when building, deploying, using, and managing cloud infrastructure services. A CIEM security platform is designed to help with cloud identity governance and to right-size permissions that may be excessive and dormant, ensuring that each cloud entity has the minimum level of access necessary to perform its job.
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management provides centralized visibility and control by offering a centralized platform for monitoring, managing, and auditing who has access to what within Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, and whether these permissions are appropriate. CIEM helps organizations identify and mitigate excessive permissions and ¡°cloud identity debt¡± (i.e., the buildup of unused identities and excessive privileges accumulated over time).
What is the difference between CIEM and CSPM?
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management focuses on cloud identity governance, and managing user and service privileges related to the use of cloud services. It helps identify over-privileged access, excessive permissions, and unused entitlements, reducing the risk of security breaches. CIEM is a part of privileged access management, ensuring only the right individuals have access to critical resources.
On the other hand, CSPM, cloud security posture management, focuses on compliance and risk management. It involves identifying and remediating risks associated with IAM-related misconfigurations such as weak/default passwords, hardcoded secrets, wildcard permissions, no MFA, and more.
Although both CIEM and CSPM are crucial for cloud security, their focus areas differ. CIEM manages what actions users and services can take, while CSPM assesses the configuration of cloud services with frameworks and best practices. Both contribute to a comprehensive cloud security strategy.
How is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) used?
CIEM is used to manage user access and entitlements especially in regards to identity and access management (IAM) in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. CIEM security solutions use data analytics and machine-learning techniques to detect anomalies, manage user entitlements and provide data governance. Using CIEM best practices, organizations can consistently implement stringent access controls and zero-trust policies across cloud environments.
What's the relationship between CIEM and cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP)?
Both CIEM and the CNAPP contribute significantly to cloud security, but they play different roles. CIEM is centered around privileged access management, ensuring that the correct individuals or services have appropriate access in a cloud environment. It identifies over-privileged access and unused entitlements, thus reducing security risks.
CNAPP, on the other hand, is designed to holistically secure cloud-native applications. It is a superset of integrated cloud security capabilities that provide artifact scanning, risk assessments, and threat detection across each stage of the cloud-native application lifecycle.
The relationship between CIEM and CNAPP is symbiotic. CIEM is very much a part of CNAPP. CIEM is a key component of CNAPP, as it manages entitlements and secures privileged access. Together, they form a robust cloud security strategy.
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