What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)?

With rising cloud adoption, organizations now face the challenge of managing access privileges across their cloud infrastructure. A single startup might handle thousands of permissions spanning users, applications, and services across multiple cloud platforms. These permissions touch every aspect of cloud operations—from who can spin up virtual machines and access sensitive database records to which teams can modify storage configurations or deploy new cloud resources. With this shift, companies need better ways to protect sensitive data and infrastructure while maintaining the speed and flexibility cloud computing offers. Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) helps organizations maintain control over their expanding cloud environments through tools that monitor and analyze identity-based permissions while helping to ensure security compliance.

Manual access control and static privilege assignments may be insufficient for the dynamic nature of cloud-native environments, where permissions must be carefully managed to prevent unauthorized access while keeping systems running smoothly. CIEM platforms use advanced analytics to provide visibility into permissions across cloud providers, automatically detecting risky access rights and helping to ensure users and systems have exactly the access they need—no more, no less. Read on to explore how CIEM systems work, its role in strengthening security, the practical benefits it delivers, and what to consider when choosing a CIEM solution for your organization.

What is cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM)?

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a specialized security solution that helps organizations manage and secure access permissions across their cloud environments. It provides continuous monitoring and analysis of identities, permissions, and resource relationships to detect and prevent security risks from overly broad or unused access rights. CIEM platforms use advanced analytics to implement the principle of least privilege, ensuring users and systems have only the permissions they need to perform their tasks while automatically identifying and remediating excess privileges.

For scaling startups that are growing their cloud infrastructure, CIEM becomes important as they juggle increasing numbers of users, services, and permissions across multiple cloud platforms, helping prevent security gaps that can emerge during rapid expansion.

What is the difference between CIEM and SIEM?

Security information and event management (SIEM) systems collect and analyze security events and logs from across an organization’s infrastructure to detect potential security threats and incidents. While SIEM focuses on broad security monitoring and incident detection across all systems, CIEM specifically concentrates on managing and securing cloud access permissions and entitlements. Think of SIEM as your overall security monitoring system, while CIEM serves as your specialized cloud permissions guardian.

What is the difference between CIEM and CSPM?

Cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools focus on monitoring cloud infrastructure configurations and compliance against security best practices and regulatory requirements. Where CSPM ensures your cloud infrastructure is configured securely, CIEM zeroes in specifically on managing the permissions and access rights within that infrastructure. CSPM and CIEM often work together—CSPM handles the broader security configuration management while CIEM provides deep visibility and control over who and what can access your cloud resources.

How does CIEM work?

CIEM creates a comprehensive view of resource access so administrators can manage access control. A CIEM tool can find unused accounts, access anomalies, excessive permissions, overly permissive access and privileged accounts that should be updated or restricted.

To do so, the CIEM tracks cloud permissions and access rights across different cloud accounts. Security teams can see permissions by cloud provider, cloud environments, cloud resources and review overall cloud security even if multiple cloud platforms are in use. Admins can enforce security policies by continuously monitoring security posture. Without CIEM tools, teams have to manually track identity and access, change access configuration and mitigate access risks posed by cloud platforms.

Here’s an overview of the process a CIEM solution follows:

1. Scanning your cloud infrastructure and cloud environments

During this step, you’ll integrate your CIEM security solutions with all of your cloud infrastructure, applications and systems. Your CIEM tools scan the cloud to find permissions, users and resources.

Whenever new tooling or infrastructure is added, the CIEM tools find and gather the data it needs for access management.

2. Mapping permissions

CIEM tools analyze and map complex webs of relationships between users, permissions, access patterns, and group structures across cloud environments. This comprehensive view helps organizations identify dormant accounts, excessive permissions, and potential security risks that traditional tools might miss.

Since cloud infrastructure permissions can have cascading effects across different services and systems, CIEM solutions need visibility across all cloud service providers, identities, and platforms in your organization to effectively manage these interconnected entitlements.

3. Enforcing policies

Using CIEM tools, you can automate enforcement of policies and start restricting or revoking access that’s no longer necessary for user tasks.

You can define these policies according to specific rules and let your CIEM tooling go to work. Privileged access management can then be enforced essentially on autopilot, recognizing excessive permissions and supporting identity governance across your cloud environment.

4. Ongoing monitoring

Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, CIEM tools look for excessive permissions and other cloud environment risks. Cloud infrastructure entitlements management occurs on an ongoing basis to proactively manage access.

5. Auditing and reporting

Your CIEM tool documents its actions and observations. This reporting is helpful for cloud compliance audits and allows you to see from a centralized dashboard any excessive permissions, how access controls are managed, who can access cloud resources, and what potential risks lurk in your cloud environment. Information on access in your cloud environments is available at a glance when you need it.

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management undertakes these cloud security steps in concert with other cloud security practices and systems, such as SIEM and CSPM. Since your CIEM tool focuses on identity and access management, you likely need other tooling to fully secure your cloud environments and cloud resources.

Why you need a CIEM solution

As cloud environments grow more complex, tracking who has access to what across your infrastructure becomes nearly impossible to manage by hand. IT teams struggle to keep up with constantly shifting permissions and access needs, especially when dealing with multiple cloud providers. Without proper tools to handle cloud access rights, security gaps can quickly multiply, putting your organization’s data and systems at risk. Here’s why to explore a CIEM solution:

Cloud security teams are overwhelmed

With cloud vulnerabilities on the rise, multi-cloud strategies more common, and cloud native applications more popular than ever, managing entitlements is becoming a bigger burden for technical teams. Many organizations are short-staffed, having growing numbers of cloud applications to manage and continue experiencing talent shortages that pose increasing security risks. As part of your security process, having a security solution to manage access control allows your organization to guard against cloud access risk.

Cloud compliance is complex

Poor visibility into cloud infrastructure entitlements increases the risk of a data breach and makes compliance with specialized regulations such as HIPAA, ISO, PCI, GDPR and others more challenging without automated tooling such as CIEM security solutions.

As protecting consumer and business data becomes increasingly important, the data regulatory environment becomes more nuanced—this is particularly true for organizations operating within global environments and interacting with multiple governments.

Eliminate scattered access policies

Managing cloud permissions through individual platforms creates a fragmented security landscape, where each service has its own set of rules and terminology for access control. Instead of juggling different policies across DigitalOcean, AWS, Azure, GCP, and various SaaS applications, CIEM solutions provide a unified approach to managing entitlements. This centralization not only simplifies policy management but also helps close security gaps that often emerge when permissions are handled separately across multiple platforms.

What are the benefits of CIEM?

Implementing a new security solution like CIEM requires initial investment and organizational change, but the long-term advantages make it a valuable tool for modern cloud operations. As cloud environments grow more complex, organizations are finding that CIEM’s capabilities can help offset implementation costs through improved security and reduced manual oversight. Organizations that adopt CIEM solutions often see benefits in several key areas, including:

Automate access management

A development team might discover that a CIEM solution automatically flagged and removed database access for three former contractors who left months ago—a task that would have taken hours to track down manually. CIEM platforms streamline permission management by automatically monitoring and adjusting access rights based on actual usage patterns. Instead of manually reviewing and updating permissions, security teams can set policies that automatically grant and revoke access as needed. This automation reduces the administrative burden while ensuring access rights stay current and appropriate.

Improve cloud security policies

CIEM solutions help organizations develop and enforce consistent security policies across their entire cloud infrastructure. For instance, it might immediately identify 200 unused permissions across development environments that posed unnecessary security risks. By analyzing permission patterns and usage data, these platforms can identify policy gaps and recommend improvements based on security best practices. This insight allows security teams to implement more effective policies for managing access rights.

Better access visibility

CIEM provides a clear view of who has access to what across your cloud environment, making it easier to spot potential security risks. The platform continuously maps relationships between users, groups, and resources, helping security teams understand the full scope of access permissions. This visibility helps organizations maintain proper access boundaries and prevent permission creep. For instance, a retail company’s CIEM might show that temporary seasonal employees still had access to payment processing systems months after the holiday rush ended.

Balance cloud security with user experience

Modern CIEM platforms help organizations strike the right balance between tight security controls and user productivity. These solutions can intelligently adjust access rights based on user behavior and business needs without creating unnecessary friction. A software company using CIEM might automatically grant developers elevated permissions during deployment windows and revoke them afterward, maintaining security without slowing down releases. This approach ensures teams can work efficiently while keeping systems secure.

Improve compliance

CIEM solutions strengthen compliance efforts by providing detailed audit trails and automated policy enforcement. When auditors required proof of data access controls, a financial services firm could use a CIEM platform to generate reports instead of spending weeks manually gathering evidence. These platforms help organizations demonstrate compliance with various regulations by tracking and documenting all access-related changes and permissions.

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