CIEM Security Best Practices: 5 Steps to Success

A successful CIEM approach focuses on depth and breadth: discovering, managing, and protecting identities, and seamlessly working alongside other identity security technologies to gather and apply context about the entire IT estate. Here are some best practices to adopt:

1. Assess & Map (Cloud Identity Visibility)

Start by understanding which identities exist and how access actually works. Visibility starts by inventorying human, machine, workload, AI agent, and third-party identities across cloud environments. Additionally, map roles, policies, keys, and secrets, then visualize relationships and privilege escalation pathways to expose blast radius risk.

2. Design Guardrails (Cloud Least Privilege)

Take steps to reduce identity risks. Start by identifying and right-sizing unneeded, high-risk cloud permissions. You can do so by replacing broad roles with scoped access that aligns with each role’s required tasks and workflows. Additionally, consider creating pre-approved access bundles that reflect how long a real-world identity actually needs access to a given resource (e.g., DB read: 1 hour, Kubernetes cluster admin: 30 minutes).

3. Automate JIT Access (Enablement)

Make secure access easy—not painful. Look for ways to integrate with existing tools, such as enabling users to request access through the tech they already use, such as Slack, Teams, or CLIs. Automating access to be time-bound and auto-revoked also simplifies the user experience. Lastly, focus on tightly controlling and logging break-glass scenarios.

4. Operate & Prove (Compliance)

Leverage CIEM tooling to track evidence for every access decision: who requested it, who approved it, what was granted, how long it lasted, and which actions were taken. Keep it all centrally stored and ready to meet auditing and compliance requirements.

5. Improve Continuously (Feedback Loop)

Use the data from the previous steps to right-size access and fix configuration drift over time. Update policy rules in one place to apply changes at scale. Additionally, consider how you will integrate new threat research, so your access model stays ahead of how attackers and environments change.

CIEM matters to cloud / multicloud organizations because it helps them right-size overprivileged identities and shrink the overall identity attack surface, without causing operational disruptions or hindering productivity.

When IT teams attempt to right-size privileges, pushback is common. After all, nobody wants to lose access, and when they do need access, they can’t get it without pestering the service desk. It’s a lose / lose situation, putting security at odds with productivity.

Moreover, security teams are spread thin across many consoles. Native cloud IAM and reporting tools seem like a convenient way to save costs, but each only sees its own slice. If you’re like many others, you’ve stitched dashboards together, merged reports, and are still missing the big picture of who can do what across clouds.

The key goals of CIEM are to unify cloud permissions visibility and controls, automate policy creation and enforcement, and implement just-in-time (JIT) access workflows that improve security and workforce efficiency. Effective CIEM also enables organizations to discover and inventory identities that might have been created outside the purview of the IT team. Put simply, CIEM offers a consolidated approach to cloud access governance.

Integrating CIEM with other identity security technologies like PAM and ITDR also extends its effectiveness on revealing privilege pathways that cross domains (e.g., what if a bad actor can traverse from an on-premises environment into your cloud instance?).

The BeyondTrust CIEM solution is powered by Identity Security Insights® and Entitle, enabling a balance of security and productivity for today’s cloud teams. Our Pathfinder platform unifies these solutions into a single console approach, offering cross-domain visibility and management that combines CIEM with industry-leading PAM and ITDR.

Here are some of the powerful security and productivity-enhancing CIEM capabilities customers unlock with BeyondTrust:

When you leverage Identity Security Insights and Entitle within the BeyondTrust Pathfinder platform, gain enhanced privilege-centric identity security across domains, including capabilities such as:

• Unified view of cross-domain privilege pathways, such as on-prem to cloud

• Automatically triggered containment (disable, revoke, quarantine) from detections

• Evidence mapping to compliance and incident response playbooks

By shedding light on the True Privilege™ of every human and non-human identity across every environment (including multicloud and SaaS), Pathfinder expands your cross-domain visibility, breaks down silos, and empowers organizations to eliminate hidden identity risk, everywhere.

Get started on your CIEM journey today with our free, award-winning identity security risk assessment and uncover risky privilege pathways such as standing cloud permissions, unused admin accounts, entitlements that indirectly lead to privileged access, and other risks.