Cloud infrastructure entitlements are access rights, permissions, and privileges granted to users, applications, and services in a cloud environment. These entitlements define what actions an identity can perform on cloud resources. For example, a user might only have access to view data in a cloud service but not edit or delete it. Managing these entitlements is critical for ensuring proper, fine-grained access control, especially as cloud environments grow more complex with multiple users and services requiring different levels of access across the environment.
Solutions that offer CIEM capabilities, help automate the process of monitoring and managing cloud entitlements and provide enterprises with increased visibility to manage access rights more effectively across multi-cloud environments.
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), is a method for managing and governing privileges or permissions of cloud infrastructure identities. CIEM helps organizations control and monitor who has access to what in their cloud infrastructure, ensuring that the right users, applications, and services have the appropriate level of access for the required amount of time. This reduces security risks associated with standing privileges, over-privileged accounts, and privilege misuse.
Solutions that offer CIEM capabilities help automate the process of monitoring and managing cloud entitlements and provide enterprises with increased visibility to manage access rights more effectively across multi-cloud environments.
As enterprise networks and cloud environments grow more complex, traditional access management solutions struggle to provide the granularity required to secure dynamic cloud infrastructure and associated privileges. CIEM bridges this gap by offering more detailed visibility into identity and access privileges across multiple cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Here are some key reasons why CIEM is essential for the modern enterprise:
CIEM solutions continuously scan cloud environments, identify all active identities (both human and machine), and analyze their associated entitlements or privileges. The goal is to ensure that the privileges assigned to these identities are appropriate, secure, and in compliance with best practices.
Let's discover the step-by-step process for how CIEM works:
The first step is to discover all cloud identities, including users, services, and machines. This involves mapping out what resources these identities have access to and the respective access levels. This discovery process is crucial from a visibility perspective because many organizations aren’t aware of the entitlements that exist in their cloud infrastructure, leading to possible privilege abuse and other security threats. Bringing these under one roof gives the organization complete visibility over its cloud identities from a central console.
Once the CIEM tool identifies the associated privileges with cloud identities, it reviews them to spot over-privileged accounts, duplicate access, or inconsistencies. It checks against predefined security policies, best practices, and industry standards to make sure permissions follow PoLP.
A solution with CIEM capabilities helps continuously monitoring cloud environments to track changes to permissions and resource usage. This provides real-time identification of privilege escalation attempts, abnormal access patterns, and other security risks.
Once the analysis identifies excess privileges, the CIEM tool helps automatically revoke those privileges or adjust entitlements. CIEM tools can also suggest privilege access changes that require approval by the IT security team before they can be implemented.
A crucial requirement for organizations utilizing a CIEM solution is being able to generate continuous audit trails and comprehensive on-demand reports on entitlements, privilege changes, and compliance. These reports are important from a compliance perspective and for forensic purposes.
CIEM: As a security principle, CIEM addresses managing cloud identities and the permissions and entitlements associated with them. CIEM helps organizations achieve holistic visibility of their cloud identities and entitlements, ensure excess privileges are culled, and helps organizations enforce least privilege access for their cloud entitlements.
CSPM: Cloud security posture management solutions scan cloud environments for misconfigurations and compliance risks to improve the overall cloud security posture. While CIEM focuses on ensuring least privilege access, CSPM helps organizations administer cloud security configurations and ensure compliance risks are dealt with.
CASB: Cloud security access broker (CASB) is a security policy enforcement solution that sits between an organization's cloud service users and cloud service providers to enforce security policies when accessing cloud based resources. CASB solutions concentrate primarily on cloud applications and services, providing visibility, control, and protection.
CIEM is the answer to a number of cloud security challenges that organizations face:
CIEM solutions help mitigate the risk of excess privileges and over-privileged accounts by evaluating privileges in real time and helping enforce least privileged access. This reduces the chances of privilege abuse attacks and limits the potential damage if an attacker gains control of a cloud identity.
In large enterprise cloud environments, it is easy to lose track of identities, resulting in identity sprawl. CIEM solutions help organizations avoid identity sprawl by delivering complete visibility over their cloud identities from a single console.
Different cloud environments might have different access policies and varying levels of policy enforcement, leading to security gaps. CIEM provides a holistic approach to enforcing access controls for cloud entitlements which ensures consistency across cloud platforms.
The human element is involved in 76% of all breaches that could involve simply granting excess privileges, not revoking access, or provisioning access to the wrong user/resource. By helping automate entitlements management, CIEM ensures you have a better cloud security posture.
Most industries across the globe are subject to regional and global compliance mandates. This includes regulating access to sensitive data, having proper identity security controls in place, complying with privacy requirements, maintaining least privilege access, and more. A CIEM tool simplifies the compliance process by helping maintain least privilege access, automating the enforcement of cloud entitlement policies, and generating the required audit logs and reports for these compliance regulations.
CIEM solutions provide numerous security as well as business benefits for enterprises:
A CIEM solution ensures holistic visibility of all cloud identities and entitlements, helping the organization stay on top of security gaps and maintain least privilege access. This helps limit identity sprawl, remove excess privileges, reduce privilege misuse and the risk of unauthorized access.
CIEM solutions help organizations meet regional and global compliance requirements by providing continuous audit logs and detailed reporting for all actions pertaining to cloud identities and entitlements. Effective CIEM solutions automatically selects excess privileges to maintain full visibility of cloud identities and help ensure adherence to various security policies and compliance requirements. Some regulations that CIEM solutions can help with are HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and the GDPR.
Automated selection of excess privileges and entitlement management across your cloud environments provided by CIEM solutions reduces the workload on IT administrators and security teams. This also reduces the possibilities of manual errors and helps organizations adhere to PoLP access. With a holistic view of cloud entitlements across different cloud platforms like AWS, Microsoft Entra, and Google Cloud, efficient CIEM solutions simplify managing cloud entitlements from different platforms.
If your cloud environments contain unused or underutilized cloud resources with excessive entitlements, CIEM solutions help you identify and optimize entitlements based on necessity and least-privilege access, helping you reduce unnecessary cloud costs. By identifying and isolating unused resources, CIEM solutions also help with scalability by dynamically creating space for new resources required by your cloud environment.
With the growing proliferation of sensitive identities and resources across cloud environments, it's crucial for privileged identity and access management solutions to incorporate CIEM as a part of their capabilities.
ManageEngine's full-stack privileged access management solution, PAM360, accomplishes that. PAM360 delivers CIEM capabilities out-of-the-box, as a part of its native resources that help organizations streamline cloud entitlement governance from Day One. With PAM360, enterprises can confidently manage their cloud entitlements from a single console, ensuring their cloud environments are secure, efficient, and compliant. Learn More
Cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM) is a security function that manages and secures cloud identities, permissions and entitlements, ensuring least-privilege access across cloud environments.
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