Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a specialized field within cybersecurity

Introduction of CIEM

In Today digital workplace, Organizations are migrated to Cloud Environments. It became complex to manage User Access and Permission across cloud services. In multi cloud services, it will become risk to monitor access and lead to data breaches. To prevent this, CIEM become crucial to manage identities access in single cloud and multi cloud Environment.

It supports to implement Zero Trust Security, the principle of Least Privilege to help protect systems and against data breaches.

In this blog we will see how CIEM works, how they improve cloud security and why we needed.

CIEM

It stands for cloud infrastructure entitlement management is also called cloud entitlements management or cloud permissions management.

It is used to manage identities and access rights, permissions, or privileges in single-cloud and multi-cloud environments.

Entitlements

It determines what permissions a cloud identity has to access in cloud and multi cloud Environments

It also set limit to identities what they can do and which resource they can access.

Why CIEM important?

It allows identities to access resources in dynamic cloud environments and address operational, security, and compliance challenges facing cloud security personnel.

It has ability to implement and enforce least privilege access throughout single and multi-cloud environments. It replaces manual process with automated to manage entitlement for all identities and across multiple cloud infrastructure.

CIEM also uplevels functions, such as privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity Governance Administrations (IGA), to provide the granularity required to secure access at the resource level and to scale across growing cloud environments.

CIEM Components

Centralized Management - CIEM Dashboard help to track access across multiple cloud and anomalous activities.
Identity Governance - It set which entitlement apply to each cloud entity. It helps visibility into who access which resource at any time.

Security rules and policies-other than generic rule CIEM provide advanced tools such as machine learning and User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA). UEBA provide baseline of normal behavior for users and entities to identity if they access sensitive data at unusual time.

How CIEM is used?

CIEM is not only used to manage access for humans, it is also used to manage non-human users to access for applications.

CIEM enable access control to prevent unauthorised user to access sensitive data and restrict access to user only one who required for their roles to prevent unwanted sharing.

By using advanced techniques, it recommends to give least privilege access for only specific work. If the specific work completed the access will be revoked.

CIEM is used to manage thousands of entitlements, applications in cloud. It always used to monitor identity access, rights for validating right user access right resource follow the principle of zero trust security.

An audit will show who access which resource at any given time. It will prevent malicious activities and improve recommendation it required.

How does CIEM improve cloud security?

Automated management of entitlements – CIEM allows automatically to manage entitlement in cloud. It helps to change access based on requirement for their identity without any delay.

Compliance assurance- CIEM helps Organizations to protect data and security by enforce policies across clouds. It provides audit to improve where we need to update.

Enforcement of least privilege access – It ensures that each identity has limit privilege access for their specific work to reduce malicious activities from high level access.

Scalability and multi-cloud protection – It automatically adjust to addition or removal ensure policies and manage user permission from different cloud by multiple security tools

Visibility and control – CIEM tools provide visibility into all cloud resources to help security team ensure each identity access their specific resource.

CIEM benefits

• Enhanced Security

• Centralized Visibility

• Policy Consistency

• Compliance Support

• Scalability

• Improved Operational Efficiency

• Risk Mitigation.

What is the difference between CIEM and IAM?

Identity Access Management - IAM encompasses the entire lifecycle of user identities, including creation, management, authentication and authorization. It focuses on how users access resources across various system in cloud or on premises.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management - CIEM specifically targets the management of entitlements in cloud environments. It is concerned with ensuring that users have appropriate access to cloud resources based on their roles and responsibilities.

Conclusion

CIEM plays a major role for addressing challenges faced by multi cloud environments. It not only increases security but also give different operational efficiency. CIEM is used to reduce risk by giving least privilege access and visibility across environment to prevent malicious activities at any time.