What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management?
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a security process that helps organizations manage and control access rights to cloud resources. CIEM solutions provide visibility into all entitlements across multiple cloud platforms, helping to identify and mitigate cloud access risks posed by excessive permissions.
Cloud entitlements are permissions given to a cloud identity, which can be a human, machine, or service account. They define which cloud applications a cloud user can access. It’s important to manage these privileges, because cloud identities with suboptimal, redundant, or dated privileges pose a variety of security risks.
Why CIEM must be part of your cloud security
Modern enterprises have complex multi-cloud environments with wide and ever-changing attack surfaces due to dynamic human and non-human identities, permissions, and configurations. CIEM helps you monitor, manage, and secure these entitlements:
CIEM gives you visibility and control into the identities, accounts, and machines that have access to your cloud resources. This is vital in multi-cloud environments.
This visibility can help security and operations teams reduce the attack surface of unauthorized, excessive, or unnecessary access.
Effectively monitoring access and identity can prevent data breaches due to misconfigurations.
CIEM can enhance compliance efforts by continuously monitoring and auditing entitlements.
How does CIEM work?
This Wiz Tech Talk shares insight on cloud entitlements: identity, fragmentation, policies, governance, and recommendations.
The following are four critical capabilities of CIEM that can help enterprises understand how it works and why it’s essential to make it part of their cloud security strategy and CNAPP platform.
1. Analyzing effective access
CIEM can help teams within an organization determine who has access to what. It does this by analyzing effective permissions and creating a topographic map of identities and their access across multi-cloud environments that takes into consideration mitigating cloud controls like boundaries and SCPs.
2. Right-sizing permissions
CIEM can automatically monitor cloud identities and right-size permissions based on least privilege policies. Right-sized permissions can significantly strengthen cloud security, reduce an organization’s attack surface, streamline access for legitimate users, and ensure that cloud identities aren’t a viable attack vector for threat actors.
3. Detecting accidental exposure
Top CIEM solutions can detect instances of accidental IAM exposure. Even brief instances of accidental exposure can result in the loss or compromise of sensitive cloud-based assets, credentials, and secrets. Detecting accidental exposure can help companies track the ways that leaked credentials and secrets may be leveraged by threat actors to hijack digital identities, move laterally within an organization’s cloud infrastructure, and steal valuable data.
4. Generating remediation recommendations
CIEM can do more than just detect accidental exposures. It can also provide granular recommendations that enable teams to follow step-by-step remediation actions to right-size access and revoke unused or excessive permissions. Guided remediation capabilities can help organizations address identity-related security vulnerabilities and incidents before serious damage is caused.
What challenges does CIEM help address?
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management can help organizations address numerous challenges related to access and entitlements in a cloud environment, including:
Over-Privileged Access: CIEM solutions can identify overly permissive access, ensuring that users and services have only the minimum required privileges, and reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
Identity Proliferation: With the rise of cloud services and automation, organizations often struggle to manage the sheer number of identities, including users, service accounts, and automated processes. CIEM helps centralize and manage these identities, making it easier to handle access control.
Lack of Visibility: Organizations often lack a comprehensive view of who has access to what resources. CIEM tools provide visibility into access patterns and entitlements across the cloud environment, helping organizations understand their access landscape.
Complexity of Multi-Cloud Environments: Many organizations use multiple cloud providers, leading to complex and inconsistent access control policies. CIEM can help unify access management across different cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Azure) ensuring consistent and centralized access control.
Compliance Requirements: Organizations need to comply with various regulations and standards that require specific access controls and auditing capabilities. CIEM solutions provide audit trails, reporting, and policy enforcement to help organizations meet their compliance requirements.
How CIEM improves your identity security strategy
Identity-related risks can be mitigated by ensuring that specific areas of your cloud security strategy have CIEM functionality baked in. Below are the core strategic components of a cloud security strategy where CIEM plays an important role.
| Strategic Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Identity and Access Management (IAM) | CIEM provides fine-grained control over who has access to your cloud resources and what actions they can perform. By centralizing access management, you can ensure only authorized users and applications can access sensitive data and services. |
| Least Privilege Principle | CIEM solutions help enforce the principle of least privilege by ensuring that users and applications only have the minimum level of access needed to perform their tasks. By minimizing access rights, you reduce the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches. |
| Visibility and Auditing | CIEM tools offer visibility into user activity and resource access in your cloud environments across all cloud providers. They can help detect abnormal or suspicious activities and provide audit trails for compliance purposes. |
| Policy Enforcement | CIEM allows you to define, enforce, and automate security policies across your cloud environment. These policies can be based on factors such as user roles, geography, time, and more. |
| Automated Remediation | CIEM can automatically generate recommendations that allow teams to follow guided remediation steps to reduce access and revoke unused permissions. |
| Compliance | By providing visibility, control, and auditing capabilities, CIEM can help organizations comply with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. |
| Privileged Access Management (PAM) | PAM benefits from CIEM's insights into cloud entitlements to identify risky behaviors and potential compromise of privileged accounts. |
CIEM security benefits
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management can benefit businesses of all sizes and from all sectors. There are four main transformative benefits of CIEM that enterprises need to be aware of: visibility, security posture, compliance, and remediation.
1. Enhanced visibility
CIEM enriches businesses with thorough visibility into entitlements and identities across multi-cloud environments. It helps enterprises understand what resources their various users have access to. The critical capability of CIEM is that it provides a centralized console from which businesses can surveil and manage cloud entitlements and privilege policies. Enhanced visibility will help enterprises weed out redundant, dormant, and overprivileged digital identities.
2. Robust security posture
The enforcement of the principle of least privilege ensures that digital identities have streamlined access to the cloud resources that are vital to their tasks. It also ensures that cloud identities have no additional cloud entitlements—both in terms of actions and access—beyond what they need to perform their essential tasks.
3. Improved compliance
Organizations must comply with specific industry standards and regulations in order to operate in the cloud. CIEM can help companies stay compliant with a range of region- and industry-specific regulators including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and FedRAMP. Automated CIEM mechanisms can help enterprises identify and remediate identity-related risks in quick time, which can help enterprises avoid legal fines and other penalties. CIEM can also enhance an organization’s audit readiness.
4. Detection and remediation of identity-related risks
Digital identities can carry a range of risks, including unnecessary privileges, outdated permissions, and misconfigurations that may lead to accidental public exposure. The best CIEM solutions can automatically detect, prioritize, and remediate these identity-related risks, which can help enterprises avoid major financial and operational setbacks.
How CIEM works with CNAPP
Traditionally, CIEM has been a siloed cloud security solution, but more recently organizations are realizing the power of unifying it with other cloud security solutions. CNAPP
Integrating CIEM as a part of a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) provides a more comprehensive and holistic security solution for cloud-native applications.
CIEM focuses on managing and monitoring access permissions, ensuring that only authorized entities have the necessary entitlements
CNAPP covers all aspects of cloud-native application security, including container security, cloud security posture management (CSPM), and cloud workload protection (CWPP).
By combining these approaches, organizations can enhance visibility into their environments, streamline security operations, and make it easier to identify potential security threats – ultimately achieving a more complete and consistent security posture for their cloud-native applications.
Control cloud entitlements with Wiz
Wiz makes CIEM easy by using cloud provider APIs to give full visibility across your cloud environment, including identities, permissions, and effective access.
Identity components such as users, service accounts, roles, groups, and policies are standardized across cloud providers, providing you a unified and easy to parse view.
You can keep multi-cloud environments secure, manage identities and permissions, and automatically find and fix risky configurations without getting bogged down in complexities. See it firsthand with a demo.
Wiz’s demo is an easy way for organizations to see firsthand the benefits of unifying CIEM with other cloud security solutions into a CNAPP.
Take Control of Your Cloud Entitlements
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