Why CIEM is Essential for Modern Businesses

Centralized visibility of human and nonhuman identities and their effective permissions (entitlements) is crucial to managing cloud infrastructure entitlements. However, legacy security solutions are not equipped to handle the dynamic and ephemeral nature of cloud environments, making it difficult to achieve this visibility.

The solution to this issue is CIEM. So what does CIEM means? Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management provides deep visibility into entitlements and offers automated remediation guidance. This way, businesses can enforce least privilege approaches and maintain secure cloud infrastructure.

Improved Security

CIEM can be paired with Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions to ensure unified identity and account entitlement monitoring. This allows for an effective policy of least privilege across multiple cloud environments and reduces the attack surface for bad actors.

Unlike traditional PAM solutions, which focus on securing privileged credentials, CIEM provides visibility into the net effect of permissions in cloud accounts. This enables organizations to identify overprivileged users and workloads as well as unprotected data, which are a significant security risk.

In addition, CIEM can help to align entitlements with industry regulations automatically, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. This ensures that only the minimum permissions are granted to a user or machine and are only used for as long as necessary to complete the task at hand. Moreover, CIEM can detect configuration changes that may cause non-compliance and help mitigate the impact of these risks. This is a critical feature when choosing the right CIEM solution for your business. Most leading CIEM platforms are designed to be dynamic and adapt to the changing resource landscape of your cloud environment. This ensures that your business’s security posture is fortified and remains in check.

Scalability

With CIEM, you can grant, resolve, enforce, or revoke access privileges across all identities in your multi-cloud infrastructure. This prevents over-permissions, a common security risk in cloud environments. This is a result of humans making mistakes when assigning permissions, which can leave identities with too many permissions that attackers could exploit.

CIEM monitors the activity of human users, machines, and other nonhuman identities to ensure they only use their required access. This helps to maintain compliance and reduces the chances of a data breach, which can be expensive and damaging to your brand reputation.

CIEM uses a least-privilege approach to manage cloud identity permissions, which requires an enterprise to assign only the minimum set of permissions required for each task. It also enables temporary access privileges for the time it takes to perform the work, reducing the attack surface and keeping your company compliant. This is a critical feature, especially when dealing with complex regulations. It can save you from fines, business disruptions, and lost customer trust.

Automation

Organizations deploying and migrating workloads to the cloud create new identities, account privileges, and entitlements. CIEM solutions automatically discover and analyze these entitlements to identify gaps in security and compliance. This centralized, automated process helps teams implement best practice security policies and enforce least privilege access across multi-cloud environments.

CIEM solutions reduce the attack surface by eliminating inactive identity accounts, reining in excessive permissions, identifying behavioral anomalies, and revoking standing privileges – curbing exposure of resources and eliminating vulnerability windows. They also monitor changes to entitlements and assets, helping teams fix a change introducing risk or detecting attacker activity.

Automated remediation features in a CIEM solution replace time-consuming manual intervention, freeing up security team staff to focus on the most pressing threats and opportunities for improvement. CIEM solutions continuously monitor and assess the effectiveness of cloud access controls, providing teams with recommendations for improving them. This allows for quicker remediation of security risks and eliminates potential exploitation of overlooked credentials, which can then be exploited to move laterally within an organization’s interconnected systems.

Analytics

The CIEM solution offers analytics features that help to assess the risk and security posture of cloud infrastructure. It can identify unused permissions, IAM misconfigurations, and other vulnerabilities that could lead to data breaches. It also helps the team to take immediate action and mitigate risks promptly.

Unlike traditional identity and access management solutions, which manage static self-hosted and on-premises infrastructure, CIEM manages ephemeral, dynamic cloud environments. This requires more flexible, fine-grained permissions and a different approach to governing those permissions. CIEM delivers this capability by continuously monitoring and analyzing the entitlements landscape. This allows for detecting anomalies and then offers remediation recommendations based on the Principle of Least Privilege.

The best CIEM solutions integrate easily with other security tools, workflows, and identity governance systems like PAMs. This enables organizations to implement the best-in-class CIEM solution with minimal business disruption.

Integration

With the growing number of cloud environments and their complexity — 1,000s of microservices needing access to resources and layers of policies that often change — managing entitlements requires the power of automation. A CIEM solution provides the ability to visualize entitlements amongst human and nonhuman identities, services, and cloud resources, analyze the landscape of permissions to expose risk, detect threats, and enforce least privilege as part of a complete cloud security strategy.

CIEM can also be integrated with IAM and PAM tools to provide complete visibility through a single interface. This reduces the chances of a security breach caused by overprivileged accounts and permissions. It enables organizations to enforce the principle of least privilege by granting privileged access in a brief manner that only lasts for the duration needed to execute a task, reducing the enterprise’s attack surface.

Widely used legacy security solutions like privileged access management (PAM) tools can’t fully solve modern entitlement issues because they lack the granularity necessary to track multi-cloud systems or focus on cloud configuration without giving deep visibility into entitlements. CIEM solutions help enterprises manage the risk of these problems by integrating with IAM and PAM to deliver a holistic approach to entitlement management.