As organizations scale in the cloud, managing identities and access becomes increasingly complex. Every new service, application, and role adds more permissions, and without proper oversight, security gaps can emerge. While strong authentication methods like SSO and MFA help establish identity, they don’t address the challenge of what those identities can access.
That’s where Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) come in. CIEM provides visibility and control over permissions, ensuring least privilege is enforced across cloud environments. PAM secures privileged access and monitors sessions post-authentication. Together, these controls enable organizations to manage access securely without compromising agility. Here are the best practices for ensuring your cloud identities remain secure through a CIEM and Secure Cloud Access strategy.
Cloud Identity Security Best Practices
1. Gain Full Visibility into Cloud Identities & Permissions
Managing cloud identities without visibility is like trying to navigate a city without a map. As organizations adopt multi-cloud environments, permissions become fragmented across providers, SaaS applications, and identity platforms, making it difficult to track who has access to what.
A CIEM solution should:
Map effective permissions across cloud environments, considering native controls like IAM roles, ACLs, SCPs, and resource-based policies.
Correlate human and non-human identities with cloud resources to expose excessive permissions.
Highlight high-risk access to sensitive data, reducing the blast radius of an attack.
With centralized visibility, security teams can quickly pinpoint access risks and take proactive steps to reduce exposure.
2. Remove Identity Risks & Enforce Least Privilege
Over time, identities—both human and machine—accumulate permissions they no longer need. This can lead to excessive access that increases security risk. Adopting least privilege ensures that every identity has only the permissions necessary to perform its job.
Key steps to enforce least privilege:
Identify and eliminate excessive permissions to minimize risk exposure.
Revoke unused access to ensure dormant accounts don't become security vulnerabilities.
Detect identity misconfigurations, such as missing MFA, weak password policies, or overly broad permissions.
Secure third-party identities, ensuring vendors and external users only have access to what they need.
A CIEM solution should provide guided remediation, making it easy to adjust permissions, scope them down to least privilege, and to remove any identity risks.
3. Prioritize Critical Attack Paths
Not all identity risks are equal. Some identities are directly tied to sensitive workloads or production environments, making them more important to secure. Organizations can improve security by:
Correlating identity risks with other cloud risks, such as misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, or exposed data.
Using a security graph to visualize attack paths and identify the most dangerous access points.
Prioritizing remediation based on impact, addressing high-risk identities first.
For example, an engineer with unused admin rights to a production database with sensitive data presents a greater risk than a test account with excess permissions but no data access. Prioritizing identity risks in the context of cloud security helps teams focus their efforts effectively.
4. Implement Access with Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP)
Leaving engineers or workloads with standing privileges is unnecessary and risky. ZSP ensures privileged access is granted just in time, with just enough permissions, and removed immediately after use.
With ZSP, even if credentials are compromised, they provide no value to attackers because there are no persistent permissions to exploit. This approach minimizes risk while allowing teams to access what they need when they need it.
5. Balance Security & Productivity with Seamless Controls
Security should enhance productivity, not hinder it. Engineers need seamless access to the resources they require without unnecessary friction.
Best practices include:
Ensuring native user experiences, allowing engineers to use their preferred CLI and web console interfaces.
Avoiding shared accounts unless absolutely necessary.
Automating governance and approvals, making just-in-time access requests frictionless.
When security controls align with workflows, teams stay productive while reducing risk.
6. Apply Privilege Controls Post-Authentication
Zero Trust extends beyond authentication. Once users gain access, additional safeguards ensure sessions remain secure. Threat actors often target active sessions through phishing, token theft, or session hijacking.
Organizations can mitigate risk with:
Continuous authentication: Revalidating identity dynamically as users perform actions in the cloud.
Session protection: Securing active sessions to prevent unauthorized access or manipulation.
Session recording: Logging privileged sessions for auditing, compliance, and threat detection.
These controls add another layer of security, ensuring that even authorized users remain subject to ongoing verification.
7. Maintain Continuous Identity Governance
Cloud environments are constantly evolving. Identities, permissions, and workloads change over time, and security teams need continuous governance to prevent identity drift and excessive permissions from accumulating unnoticed.
CIEM enables organizations to:
Monitor and detect new risks as they emerge.
Enforce least privilege continuously rather than as a one-time effort.
Automate risk-based alerts and remediation, helping security teams focus on the highest-priority risks.
Continuous governance ensures that security controls adapt as cloud environments grow and change.
8. Enable On-Demand Access for Unplanned Events
Even the best permission models need flexibility. When incidents occur, on-call engineers need rapid but controlled access to resolve them.
Within a ZSP framework, organizations can:
Automate approval for urgent access requests, ensuring rapid response times.
Integrate with ChatOps tools to streamline real-time access requests and approvals.
Grant and revoke access automatically, ensuring privileges are removed immediately after use.
This approach ensures that security remains intact while allowing engineers to respond to critical events without delay.
Operationalizing ZSP with Wiz + CyberArk
The goal is to make ZSP and Zero Trust practical and scalable across cloud environments. The integration of Wiz and CyberArk enables customers to achieve that by combining Wiz’s capabilities for discovering toxic combinations of critical risks and misconfigured cloud access with CyberArk’s capabilities for implementing Zero Standing Privileges, enabling cloud security teams to measurably reduce the risk of unauthorized access and rapidly satisfy audit and compliance requirements.
With the integration joint customers can:
• Improve visibility to discover identities with excessive privileges and prioritize risks throughout the entire development lifecycle
• Remove Standing Excessive Privileges to reduce risk of compromised cloud identities
• Automate remediation steps of moving to Zero Standing Privilege, with Just-in-Time provisioning
• Report and Secure all Cloud Identities: Enable easy understanding of which identities are protected and which are not, offering clear and actionable intelligence to secure your cloud access
Curious to explore the integration? Learn more on the Wiz Integration page and the CyberArk Marketplace integration page.
