What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)?

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a specialized and automated cloud security solution aimed at reducing the risk of data breaches in public cloud environments. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud platforms, managing access and entitlements becomes more challenging due to the dynamic and complex nature of cloud infrastructures. CIEM addresses this by providing continuous monitoring of permissions and activities for both human and machine identities.

The primary goal of CIEM is to prevent excessive entitlements access permissions that exceed what is necessary for a specific task. By ensuring that entities operate within appropriate access controls, CIEM helps maintain a secure cloud environment. This proactive approach minimizes the risk of unauthorized access, insider threats, and data breaches.

An effective CIEM solution offers comprehensive reporting tools that provide actionable insights into access policies and configurations. These reports simplify access management, enabling security teams to identify and address potential vulnerabilities efficiently. Furthermore, CIEM enhances the overall cloud security posture by ensuring adherence to the principle of least privilege, a critical security practice in cloud environments.

By reducing disruptions to DevOps workflows and automating complex entitlement processes, CIEM empowers organizations to achieve their operational and security goals seamlessly. Tgis ensures a robust and resilient cloud infrastructure.

Why are CIEM Solutions Essential?

Organizations increasingly rely on public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to boost innovation and streamline operations. Many adopt multi-cloud architectures to optimize factors like cost, availability, and flexibility.

Cloud environments are inherently dynamic, making traditional identity and access management (IAM) solutions, which are designed for static, on-premises systems, ineffective. These solutions struggle to safeguard the ephemeral nature of cloud infrastructure.

To address these challenges, cloud providers have developed native IAM tools and frameworks to help organizations manage access to resources in rapidly evolving cloud environments. However, the scale, complexity, and fluidity of cloud IAM often lead to significant security, compliance, and operational hurdles for cloud security teams.

CIEM solutions tackle these issues by enhancing visibility and identifying IAM misconfigurations. They also resolve these misconfigurations and implement least-privilege access across both single and multi-cloud environments.

What Are the Components of CIEM?

The core components of Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) include entitlement visibility, rightsizing permissions, advanced analytics, and compliance. Effectively managing entitlements and addressing entitlement risks begins with understanding the entitlements within your environment. CIEM tools facilitate this by automatically scanning access control policies, rules, and configurations to identify:

• Existing entitlements.
• Actions human or machine users can perform based on those entitlements.
• Cloud resources accessible to each human or machine user through their entitlements.

Once an entitlement is identified, CIEM tools evaluate it to ensure the granted access privileges are limited to what is strictly necessary to achieve the workload’s intended purpose. If the entitlement allows excessive access, CIEM tools notify administrators, who can manually resolve the issue.

Alternatively, the tools can automatically adjust entitlements, enabling efficient management in large-scale environments.

Instead of relying on generic rules, CIEM tools leverage advanced analytics, such as machine learning and user/entity behavior analytics (UEBA), for entitlement assessments. While compliance is not the primary objective of CIEM, these tools align entitlements with compliance standards by automatically checking if they meet regulatory requirements. Additionally, CIEM tools can identify “drift,” where compliant entitlements become non-compliant due to configuration changes.

How Is CIEM Used?

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) empowers organizations to implement advanced techniques, such as machine learning. These techniques help enforce and maintain least-privilege access tailored to specific tasks.

This approach minimizes security risks while ensuring operational efficiency. For example, a user might require temporary SSH access to a production machine to validate a configuration setting or review an environment variable.

Using CIEM, the user submits a request for temporary SSH key pair access. The security team evaluates and approves the request, requiring the user to obtain the keys through a Single Sign-On (SSO) provider.

After completing the necessary task, the access is automatically revoked, ensuring the keys cannot be reused. This process allows the security team to maintain real-time visibility of each user’s permissions and verify that they align with the minimum access requirements for the task.

The Challenges of Entitlement Management

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) helps address several critical challenges in managing cloud access and ensuring robust security. Here’s how CIEM solutions help organizations overcome these challenges:

• Enable Agile DevOps: CIEM removes barriers to fast and secure code deployment. This allows developers to work efficiently while ensuring strong security practices are maintained.

• Simplify Monitoring in Complex Multicloud Environments: CIEM facilitates effective monitoring and governance across dynamic, globally distributed multicloud infrastructures. This ensures seamless management of security and compliance.
• Control Excessive Permissions: CIEM limits unnecessary permissions. This will reduce the risk of misuse or abuse by both human and machine accounts. This includes privileged ones, by adhering to the principle of least privilege.
• Maintain Visibility and Compliance: CIEM ensures consistent visibility across different cloud infrastructures. It also helps maintain compliance, considering each infrastructure’s unique security frameworks and governance requirements.

By addressing these challenges, CIEM solutions help organizations streamline operations, enhance security, and maintain compliance across diverse cloud environments.

Key Security Benefits of CIEM

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) offers several key security benefits that help organizations better manage their cloud access and security. These benefits include:

• Multicloud Visibility into Entitlements: CIEM provides a comprehensive view of identities, net effective cloud permissions, policies, and access risks across multiple cloud environments. This helps organizations monitor and manage entitlements in complex multicloud setups.
• Improved Identity and Access Management: Gartner reports that more than 95% of accounts in IaaS use less than 3% of the entitlements granted to them. CIEM solutions help identify and eliminate inactive identities, such as those of former employees or proof-of-concept labs. They also continuously monitor access activity to adjust and rightsize permissions.
• Automatic Detection and Remediation: CIEM solutions establish baseline activity profiles and can detect abnormal events. These events include account compromises, insider threats, stolen access keys, or other potentially malicious user activities, enabling timely remediation.
• Audit-Ready: By continuously monitoring and securing entitlements, CIEM helps organizations adhere to compliance regulations and standards related to user permissions. This makes it easier to stay audit-ready and meet necessary security requirements.

These benefits collectively enhance the security, visibility, and compliance of cloud infrastructures. This allows organizations to manage entitlements effectively and reduce the risk of unauthorized access or misuse.

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Conclusion

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a vital tool for securing dynamic and complex cloud environments. By ensuring least-privilege access, enhancing visibility, and streamlining compliance, CIEM solutions enable organizations to mitigate risks and maintain strong security across single and multi-cloud infrastructures. As cloud adoption grows, CIEM helps organizations balance agility with security, ensuring efficient operations without compromising sensitive data.

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