Day in and day out, companies are migrating to the cloud. While some companies use a single cloud service, others opt for multi-cloud environments to meet their requirements. If you think managing access was a headache in an on-premise setup, one can only imagine the complexity of managing access to sensitive resources across multiple cloud services.
Too many people with too much access are a recipe for disaster. Microsoft’s 2024 State of Multicloud Security Risk Report found that only 2% of the permissions granted were actually being used. Worse yet, half of all those permissions were deemed high-security risks. These problems aren't just technical—they can cost time, money, and trust.
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) provides a practical way to monitor and control who has access to your cloud resources. With CIEM tools and solutions you can reduce errors and cut down on cybersecurity risks, giving your teams a clear view of access rights across the board.
But what exactly makes CIEM different from other traditional access management solutions? In this guide, we'll break down what CIEM is, the challenges it helps solve, and the benefits it brings to managing cloud access.
Cloud entitlements are the permissions granted to identities (users, groups, roles, and services) that determine what actions they can perform on which resources in cloud environments.
Entitlements can be thought of as digital keys. Whether it's a person logging into a console, a program communicating with other services, or a virtual machine accessing data, these permissions play a significant role.
The main problem is that organizations often hand out too many keys without proper checks. AWS alone offers over 40,000 different permission combinations. Multiply that across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other platforms, and you're looking at hundreds of thousands of possible permission settings.
Without proper oversight, these ‘digital keys’ pile up, leading to excessive access rights—a major risk that CIEM is designed to
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a cybersecurity process that automates tracking and managing cloud permissions.
In simpler terms, it acts as a central hub for monitoring who gets access to cloud resources, ensuring that each identity—whether a person, service, or machine—only has the permissions it needs. CIEM solutions help reduce risks by enforcing the principle of least privilege and revoking excessive access rights that might otherwise open doors for security issues.
CIEM platforms operate through a multi-stage process:
- Identity Discovery and Inventory: First, they connect to cloud environments through APIs to collect detailed information about identities, resources, policies, roles, and access logs. This data feeds into a unified model that normalizes different cloud providers' approaches to permissions.
- Permission Analysis and Visualization: Next, analysis engines process this information to determine effective permissions - what each identity can do across all connected cloud services. This analysis considers both direct and indirect access paths.
- Risk Assessment: The system then applies risk scoring based on factors like permission scope, sensitivity of accessible resources, usage patterns, and industry best practices. High-risk permissions get flagged for review.
- Remediation: Finally, remediation processes help security teams adjust permissions to implement the principle of least privilege. Some PAM tools can automatically make certain low-risk adjustments, while others generate requests that go through approval workflows.
Throughout this cycle, the CIEM platform continuously monitors for changes and provides up-to-date visibility into the organization's cloud permission landscape. This ongoing monitoring helps organizations proactively manage cloud risk and stay audit-ready.
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Cloud identity sprawl hits enterprises hard. The typical enterprise uses multiple cloud providers, each with identity systems, permission models, and management interfaces. All that fragmentation ends up creating several cybersecurity challenges:
- Excessive Permissions: Administrators often grant "just in case" access that is never revoked. Microsoft Reports show that most super users use less than 2% of their assigned permissions, leaving the remaining 98% as potential attack vectors.
- Visibility Gaps: With multiple cloud platforms in use, security teams struggle to see who has access to what cloud resources, making full-risk assessments difficult.
- Complex Permission Structures: Each provider—AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud—has its permission model. Managing these varying systems requires different expertise and adds to the complexity.
- Outdated Access Reviews: Manual reviews that use sheets and logbooks can’t keep up with the rapid changes in cloud resources and access needs.
- Multi-cloud Complexity: Juggling different cloud systems makes it hard to maintain consistent access controls.
Now that we have seen how cloud identity sprawl and fragmented permission systems can create security headaches, it's time to explore how CIEM solutions can turn this complexity into clarity.
Here's how CIEM solutions effectively tackle the above-listed challenges organizations face in the cloud:
- Centralized Oversight: CIEM solutions bring all cloud access under one roof, streamlining the management process.
- Automated Permission Management: Leveraging advanced AI algorithms and behavioral analytics, CIEM solutions can automatically track and revoke unnecessary permissions, reducing potential attack vectors.
- Enhanced Visibility: With real-time insights across multiple cloud environments, it empowers teams to quickly identify and address security gaps.
- Simplified Management: By harmonizing different permission models, it eliminates the need for multiple management interfaces and expertise across platforms.
- Efficient Access Reviews: Automated processes keep pace with dynamic cloud environments, ensuring access rights are always up to date.
When cloud permissions go unmanaged, security risks multiply. Leading cloud security solutions like Securden’s Unified PAM tackle this head-on by bringing CIEM capabilities into a broader access management strategy. Arm your security teams with practical tools for immediate improvements and take your first step towards comprehensive cloud governance.
While CIEM solutions can solve a handful of your cybersecurity issues, are they the right pick for your access management requirements? Moreover, how are they different from other related technologies like cloud security posture management and privilege access management?
Let's clear up the confusion about where CIEM sits compared to other security technologies you might already use. Security leaders often struggle to determine which solution handles what — this breakdown will help you choose the right tools for each layer of cloud access.
Here’s a comparison between CIEM, IAM, CSPM, and PAM solutions.
| Feature |
CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management) |
IAM (Identity and Access Management) |
CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) |
Traditional PAM (Privileged Access Management) |
| Definition |
Least privilege enforcement for cloud identities |
Identity lifecycle management across an organization |
Configuration risk detection and remediation |
Privileged account protection |
| Primary Focus |
Human and machine identities in cloud services |
Internal and external users across systems |
Cloud administrators managing configurations |
Privileged users with elevated access rights |
| Visibility |
Real-time insights into cloud permissions |
Broad visibility into user identities |
Holistic view of cloud architecture risks |
Focused monitoring of privileged accounts |
| Use Cases |
Detecting excessive permissions, enforcing least privilege access, multi-cloud permission normalization, permission risk assessment |
User provisioning/de-provisioning, centralized authentication, SSO implementation, access certification |
Configuration compliance checking, cloud security standards enforcement, drift detection, misconfiguration identification |
Privileged credential vaulting, admin session monitoring, just-in-time access, elevated privilege control |
| Technical Approach |
Permission normalization across platforms |
Directory services integration |
Configuration scanning against benchmarks |
Credential vaulting and session proxying |
| Security Benefit |
Reduces excessive permissions |
Controls identity proliferation |
Finds general cloud misconfigurations |
Protects privileged credentials |
The key distinction between CIEM and other technologies lies in CIEM's specialized focus on cloud permissions across all identity types—something traditional cybersecurity tools weren't built to handle scaling to the cloud environments. While other technologies might touch on aspects of cloud permissions, none provides the depth of visibility and control that dedicated CIEM solutions offer for this specific problem space.
Smart security teams integrate these technologies rather than viewing them as competitors. Your IAM system handles who users are, your PAM solution protects privileged human access, your CSPM tool checks broad security configurations, and your CIEM platform ensures all identities have exactly the right level of access in cloud environments—no more, no less.
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Before diving into the key features to look for, let’s examine the concrete benefits you can expect when you adopt a CIEM solution.
These CIEM solutions work hand in hand with your broader identity and access management strategy, helping to mitigate access risks across multi cloud environments.
1.Better Visibility into Cloud Access Entitlements:
CIEM tools create a unified view that shows exactly which identities have what permissions across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and other providers.
Visibility with these tools goes beyond just listing permissions—they reveal actual access paths and usage patterns. Your teams can easily distinguish between permissions being actively used versus those sitting dormant and creating unnecessary cloud attack surface.
2.Reduced cloud attack surface through permission right-sizing
As mentioned earlier, average cloud identities use only a fraction of their assigned permissions. These excessive permissions create significant access risks that attackers can exploit during data breaches.
CIEM solutions like Unified PAM can systematically identify and remove these unused access privileges, significantly reducing potential attack vectors.
3.Improved compliance posture for cloud environments
Compliance with frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and industry-specific regulations requires documented access control policies and regular reviews. CIEM platforms automate much of this documentation, providing ready evidence that only authorized users can access sensitive data.
These tools enforce core compliance principles like separation of duties and least privilege. Once deployed, you can see a significant reduction in audit preparation time.
CIEM platforms excel at continuously monitoring permission changes and usage patterns, flagging overly permissive access before it leads to security incidents. Their automated detection capabilities can spot issues that would slip past manual reviews of cloud accounts.
When problems are identified, this system will guide remediation with specific recommendations and approval workflows. Solutions like Unified PAM can even implement low-risk changes automatically, freeing cloud security teams to focus on complex issues requiring human judgment.
5.Streamlined governance across multi-cloud environments
Managing entitlements traditionally requires platform-specific expertise and separate tools for each cloud service provider. CIEM solutions normalize these differences into consistent security policies that work across your entire cloud infrastructure. This streamlining cuts administrative overhead dramatically.
6.Faster incident response for cloud security events
When security incidents occur, understanding what cloud resources a compromised identity can access becomes critical for containment. CIEM provides immediate answers to these questions about related access permissions.
Security teams can quickly determine the potential blast radius and take targeted containment actions. This precision accelerates response while minimizing business disruption to cloud-native applications.
7.Decreased costs in cloud security operations
The unified approach of CIEM reduces tool sprawl by consolidating how you manage cloud identities across providers. This consolidation typically reduces both licensing costs and operational overhead.
Implementing CIEM solutions is a key step in configuring a resilient cloud security strategy that aligns with modern demands for agility and compliance. CIEM tools can help safeguard your cloud infrastructure while simplifying multi-cloud management.
But, all of that is possible only when you have the right CIEM solution deployed, which brings us to the question of how to pick the right CIEM solution.
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When you’re out there checking out various leading CIEM platforms, prioritize these capabilities to invest in the perfect CIEM solution for your business:
- Cloud Coverage: Supports AWS, Azure, and GCP with deep integration into each platform’s permission model.
- Clear Visualization: Offers easy-to-read dashboards that simplify understanding cloud permissions for everyone.
- Right-Sizing Guidance: Uses real data to recommend proper access privileges, cutting down on excessive permissions.
- Automated Remediation: Adjusts permissions automatically through established workflow approvals to manage cloud access risk.
- API Integration: Connects smoothly with your existing security and IT tools, enhancing overall infrastructure entitlement management. For example, it can connect seamlessly with SIEM tools like Splunk or ticketing platforms like ServiceNow.
- Custom Risk Scoring: Tailors risk assessments to match your organization’s specific security priorities and compliance needs.
- Audit Trails: Records every permission change and review activity to support identity governance and compliance.
- Anomaly Detection: Flags unusual access patterns early, helping to mitigate potential data breaches.
To tie it all together, choosing a CIEM solution with these features means you’re set up to manage cloud identities and access entitlements efficiently.
A well-rounded tool not only supports deep cloud service provider integrations but also simplifies the process of enforcing consistent security policies across multi-cloud environments.
With a solution like Securden’s Unified PAM in place, your cloud security teams can focus on what matters most—keeping your sensitive data safe and your cloud attack surface to a minimum.
Cloud security challenges pile up fast. Your teams struggle with permissions across platforms while risks multiply.
That ends now.
We've explored why Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management matters. Securden Unified PAM answers these challenges with a complete solution - web-based and self-hosted with no extra hardware needed.
What makes it stand out? Everything works together. The platform handles privileged identities while providing simple resource access as well. It enforces strict permissions at every level. Live monitoring catches problems immediately, helping mitigate access risks posed by excessive privileges.
Here’s how Securden makes it simple
Securden shines brightest in privileged access governance with its zero-trust approach that helps you remove standing privileges across cloud resources. Multiple MFA options add critical security layers that ensure compliance with industry standards.
Cloud security shouldn't be complex. Securden consolidates what others spread across multiple products. You get better protection, lower costs, and fewer headaches.
Your cloud foundation deserves better protection. Securden delivers it.
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Do you still have questions about CIEM? Here are answers to the most common ones from IT and security teams.” This makes it feel more intentional and skimmable.
