Managing Cloud Entitlements via PAM360

6 minutes to read

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is essential for organizations to manage and secure cloud identities in rapidly expanding cloud environments. CIEM focuses on identifying, analyzing, and managing the permissions/privileges assigned to the identities, providing clear visibility into who has access to what.

PAM360 is a comprehensive privileged access management solution that is now more advanced with its newly introduced Cloud Entitlements Management feature with the required CIEM capabilities. With PAM360's cloud entitlement feature, you can discover your cloud accounts, identify risks in your cloud environment, and remediate risks using the recommended actions. PAM360's cloud entitlement not only provides remediation for risk but also meticulously tracks all remediation activities, ensuring a secure and compliant cloud environment via PAM360.

Note: For the time being, PAM360 only supports the management of AWS cloud accounts.

Salient Highlights of Managing Cloud Entitlements via PAM360

Enhanced Visibility: Gain detailed insights into entitlements and permissions across your cloud infrastructure.
Risk Mitigation: Identify and address excess privileges and other potential security risks due to shadow IT permissions.
Right-Size Privileges: Enforce a Just Enough Access (JEA) model by enforcing least privileges to all the accounts.
Improved Security Posture: Reduce the risk of privilege escalation attacks by leveraging inline policies for your AWS account suggested by PAM360.
Compliance Assurance: Ensure your cloud environment meets industry regulations and standards.

Roles Required for Managing Cloud Entitlements

There are certain roles required in PAM360 to perform the necessary cloud entitlements management.

By default, PAM360 users with Privileged Administrator and Cloud Administrator roles can completely manage the cloud entitlements and relevant audits carried out on the cloud accounts within PAM360.

Note: PAM360 allows users with Administrator, Privileged Administrator, and Cloud Administrator roles to disable the Cloud Entitlements tab (if required). This option is available under Admin >> General Settings >> Miscellaneous.

Apart from these predefined roles, you can also create a Custom Role with the Manage Cloud Entitlements privilege enabled to manage the complete cloud entitlements via PAM360

Terminologies and Symbols

While managing the cloud entitlements via PAM360, you will come across some terminologies that have unique meanings. It is worthwhile to take note of those terminologies before proceeding further:

1. Glossary of Terms

Terms	Description
Access Map	A visual representation of access permissions involved in policies and services attached to an identity.
Athena	An interactive query service in AWS that allows you to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL queries.
CloudTrail	An AWS service that enables governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of an AWS account.
Cloud Administrators	A PAM360 user role with administrative privileges to manage and configure AWS accounts in PAM360.
Groups	Refers to IAM groups in AWS, which are collections of IAM users that share common permissions, simplifying access management.
Identity	Denotes a user, user group, or role with assigned permissions to access cloud resources.
Impact	The potential effect or consequence of a security risk on cloud resources.
Permissions	Denotes the permissions granted to identities to access and perform actions on cloud resources.
Policy	Denotes a set of rules and configurations governing access and permissions in the cloud environment.
Remediate	An action or set of actions taken to resolve identified risks or vulnerabilities.
Remediation	Denotes the process of addressing and correcting identified security risks or misconfigurations.
Risks	Denotes potential threats or vulnerabilities that could compromise cloud security.
Revert	An action or set of actions taken to revert the remediated risk.
Roles	Refers to IAM roles in AWS, which are identities that grant temporary permissions to users or services for accessing resources.
Services	Denotes specific functionalities or resources provided by cloud service providers.
Shadow Admins	Users who have acquired administrative privileges unintentionally or without proper oversight.
Time Stamp	The record of the date and time when an event or action occurred within the cloud environment.
Users	Refers to IAM users created within an AWS account to represent individual users or applications with specific access permissions.

2. Glossary of Symbols

Symbol	Description
	Non-MFA User
	Shadow Admin Privileges
	Inactive User
	Inactive Role
	Non-Rotated Passwords
	Non-Rotated Access Keys
	Excessive Privileges
	No Defined Risks
	Critical Impact
	High Impact
	Medium Impact
	Low Impact
	No Impact