Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)
What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)?
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM - pronounced “Kim”) is the process of discovering and managing cloud permissions and entitlements. CIEM security solutions enable organizations to better manage user access and data governance across their cloud environments. By right-sizing access to cloud resources, CIEM products reduce data breach risks and harden cloud security.
CIEM tools, which are deployed in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, work by:
Continuously monitoring the cloud permissions, entitlements, and activities of entities to ensure they are operating within appropriate access controls.
Enforcing the principle of least privilege (PoLP), which means identities, systems, and processes only have the minimum access and rights absolutely needed to perform an authorized activity.
Detecting anomalies in access patterns to help identify and mitigate potential security threats.
Providing visibility into an organization's multicloud infrastructure, including who is accessing what resources, and when.
Why Organizations Need CIEM
Organizations need CIEM capabilities to achieve visibility, control, and compliance in multicloud environments.
The cloud provides a dynamic infrastructure to construct and de-provision resources based on demand and workload. Identities created for these dynamic use cases are particularly susceptible to being over-provisioned with privilege, creating inordinate risk. Microsoft’s 2024 State of Multicloud Security Report found that out of over 51,000 permissions granted to identities, only 2% are actually used. As cloud workflows grow and change, entitlements and their access can quickly become outdated and stale, particularly if the Joiner-Mover-Leaver (JML) process isn’t tightly managed.
Lack of cross-cloud entitlement management is also a major pain point for organizations. Each cloud provider—whether AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud—has its own system for handling identities and access, making it easy for permissions to become inconsistent or misconfigured. Sprawl across complex cloud or hybrid environments leads to additional risk. In fact, 40% of all breaches analyzed in IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024 involved data distributed across multiple environments, such as public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises.
Mismanagement of cloud identities is a common cause of data breaches. A Google report found that, throughout the first half of 2024, three out of four network intrusions could be attributed to weak credentials and misconfigurations across cloud systems. Without a proactive approach to managing cloud identities and their associated entitlements, a damaging incident is likely.
How do CIEM Solutions Work?
CIEM solutions work by providing a centralized, multicloud view of cloud entitlements, making it significantly easier to manage access across providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. CIEM offers an efficient method to break down these siloed cloud domains with cross-cloud visibility and fine-tuned control.
Below, we explore the core components that make CIEM vital for modern cloud security.
Account and Entitlements Discovery – Continuously inventories cloud identities and entitlements and appropriately classifies them, in real-time.
Multicloud Entitlements Reconciliation – Reconciles accounts and entitlements and identifies which ones are unique per cloud and which ones are shared.
Entitlements Enumeration – Based on discovery information, entitlements can be reported, queried, audited, and managed by the type of entitlement, permissions, and user. This allows for the pivoting of information to meet objectives and the intelligent management of identities and entitlements-based classification.
Entitlements Optimization – Based on real-time discovery and operational usage of entitlements, the solution classifies over-provisioning of identities. Then, identities can be optimized for least privileged access.
Entitlements Monitoring – Real-time discovery also enables teams to identify any changes in identities and entitlements. Monitoring provides alerting and detection of inappropriate changes that could pose a liability for the environment, processes, and data.
Entitlements Remediation – Based on all the available data, the solution recommends remediative actions. This can involve the removal of identities and associated entitlements that violate established policies, or other remediation methods to enforce least privilege principles. Some CIEM solutions may fully automate this process from alert to remediation.
Benefits of CIEM Tools
CIEM tools improve cloud security by streamlining and automating discovery, management, and monitoring of entitlements. They allow organizations to model the behavior of every identity across multiple cloud infrastructures, including hybrid environments, improving visibility and control over access risks.
CIEM also enables teams to keep up with the constant evolution of cloud infrastructures. With it implemented, an organization can apply the same policies across traditionally incompatible cloud resources. CIEM solutions use real-time automation to monitor entitlements and auto-adjust permissions dynamically, as manual oversight can’t keep up with the pace of change within the cloud.
Let’s break down the key cloud security benefits of CIEM tools:
1. Mitigating Over-Entitled Accounts
In large organizations, it’s common for both employees and service accounts to accumulate far more privileges or access than they need. Over time, these excess privileges and access can lead to insider threats or full-fledged breaches. CIEM solutions automatically identify over-privileged accounts, helping organizations better enforce least privilege.
For example: If a user in the finance department no longer needs access to a certain cloud database, CIEM can flag the entitlement for elimination, reducing the attack surface.
2. Detecting and Remediating Anomalies in Real-Time
CIEM uses behavioral analytics and AI to monitor access patterns and flag any unusual activity. For instance, an employee suddenly trying to access sensitive resources they’ve never needed before might indicate a threat.
If a user or service starts behaving outside of their usual access patterns, the CIEM system can identify this and take remediative action to prevent potential security threats. This minimizes the risk of over-provisioning entitlement access, keeping cloud environments secure and compliant.
For example: In an organization operating in a multicloud environment, a threat actor could employ a successful password spray attack, gaining access to an orphaned service account. Then, they could attempt to perform an elevated request with the entitlements (permissions) the service account has. A CIEM solution can uncover this type of irregular activity, provide contextual information around the threat, and initiate a response to stop the threat in its tracks.
3. Securing DevOps and Temporary Access Permissions
Cloud environments are dynamic, with entitlement access constantly changing to support workflows in DevOps environments. CIEM ensures temporary entitlement access—such as those granted for testing, deployment, or troubleshooting—are only valid for the pre-defined, necessary timeframes.
For example: A DevOps engineer may receive temporary access to an entitlement that grants their access to a production environment or resource. Some CIEM tools can automatically revoke the entitlement once the task is completed, ensuring no unnecessary entitlements or access persists.
4. Simplifying Multicloud Security Management
Most enterprises use multiple cloud providers. CIEM helps unify entitlement management across different platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This ensures access to entitlements is consistent and compliant across all environments, preventing configuration drift that, over time, could lead to security gaps.
For example: A business may have applications running in both AWS and Azure. CIEM ensures that the right access through entitlements is applied uniformly across both clouds, minimizing the risk of misconfigurations.
5. Supporting Compliance and Audit-Readiness
CIEM tools can generate automated reports, such as user access reviews (UARs), to provide a clear audit trail of who accessed what and when. These detailed reports simplify compliance and reduce the risk of non-compliance fines. In highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance, this level of monitoring is of utmost importance for maintaining trust and avoiding legal issues. CIEM tools can also help businesses align to industry regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and many others.
6. Minimizing Risk of Privilege Escalation Attacks
In cloud environments, privilege escalation attacks can be devastating. An attacker who gains access to a low-privilege account may then attempt to perform lateral movement until they find an account where they can escalate privileges. They can then gain access to more sensitive resources, and ultimately, steal valuable data or wreak further havoc across the network infrastructure.
CIEM minimizes this risk by ensuring privileged accounts strictly adhere to the principle of least privilege. If CIEM tools detect an abnormal request for higher permissions, they will automatically deny the escalation and alert the security team to the suspicious activity.
What is the difference between IAM and CIEM?
The difference between IAM and CIEM lies in their scope and focus. Traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions were designed primarily for static, on-premise applications and infrastructure. Such IAM systems generally leverage a form of directory services where Identities, Groups, Permissions, and Rights are managed.
As organizations moved to the cloud, the traditional network perimeter dissolved, and the types of cloud permissions with different planes of privilege exploded. Traditional IAM solutions struggle to keep up with the sheer complexity of these heterogeneous cloud environments.
CIEM, on the other hand, is purpose-built for the dynamic nature of multicloud infrastructure, solving the on-prem problems that have evolved into the cloud. Traditional IAM solutions do not provide the granular control or continuous monitoring needed in cloud environments. CIEM addresses this gap by offering fine-tuned, real-time management of entitlements, ensuring least-privilege access is always enforced, even as workloads shift.
CIEM also meets cloud-specific needs, such as granting temporary (ephemeral) permissions, leveraging automation, and keeping up with complex multicloud architectures. By giving organizations better access control, it reduces the risk of misconfigurations and over-provisioning of privilege that traditional IAM alone is ill-equipped to address.
How to Implement CIEM
To implement CIEM, organizations typically adopt solutions that are integrated into broader identity or privilege access platforms. While CIEM started as a standalone, siloed approach to address specific multicloud use cases, there are not many standalone CIEM vendors and solutions today. For instance, leading Privileged Access Management (PAM) vendors now offer mature CIEM capabilities to extend beyond traditional PAM, offering use cases for addressing cloud entitlements management and right-sizing dynamic privileges.
Pairing CIEM with other foundational PAM capabilities provides a streamlined approach to privilege management. PAM focuses on securing privileged accounts, credentials, and access pathways for humans and machines. CIEM works alongside PAM by managing cloud entitlements, making sure that both privileged and non-privileged users only have the access they need to do their jobs, and only for the finite moments needed. This holistic approach goes a long way in addressing cloud security risk and protecting direct and indirect privilege escalation paths.
ITDR capabilities are also a natural blend with CIEM and are often included within modern PAM platforms as well.
Ultimately, the best CIEM solution will help you manage cloud entitlements and access seamlessly, reduce risk, and keep your cloud infrastructure secure without adding unnecessary complexity.
The BeyondTrust platform combines PAM, CIEM, and ITDR capabilities for the most powerful, blended identity protection. Contact us today to learn how BeyondTrust manages cloud entitlements, secures identities, and addresses Paths to Privilege™.
