Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM)

Cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM) is a solution that enables organizations to manage data governance and user entitlements across their cloud environments. The CIEM concept first emerged in Gartner’s 2020 Cloud Security Hype Cycle, in which it was described as a specialized identity-centric Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution focused on managing cloud access risk and time-limited access controls. 

Entitlement management is an identity governance feature that manages the privileges assigned to every user and device in an organization’s cloud infrastructure. In hybrid and multi-cloud environments, solutions such as identity access management (IAM) and privileged identity management (PIM) are critical so that only authorized users can access a company's networks and applications. 

CIEM solutions help ensure this is the case by leveraging data analytics and machine-learning techniques to detect anomalies, manage user entitlements, and data governance. Using CIEM best practices, organizations can consistently implement stringent access controls and zero-trust policies across cloud environments. 

CIEM tools empower businesses to address issues that may arise when managing user access and entitlement, including: 

1. The difficulty of monitoring and managing data governance in dynamic, global multi-cloud environments
2. Information misuse from privileged user accounts
3. A lack of visibility that affects compliance 
4. Short-term cloud entitlements that add complexity to entitlement management
5. A lack of consistency in managing entitlements across organizations’ various cloud infrastructures 
6. User accounts that gain excessive levels of access permissions

Resolving these challenges is the biggest single driver of CIEM growth, especially since businesses require a more refined approach to managing IAM in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Cloud entitlement is central to managing the various tools built into modern cloud systems. Using code or cloud consoles and admin interfaces, businesses can define the permissions and activities available to specific users. A key role of CIEM is to address the limitations of the tools businesses use to define permissions, manage configurations and security policies, and ensure compliance. 

CIEM helps companies counter issues such as:

1. Entitlement tracking: Most cloud tools track entitlements via cloud providers’ IAM frameworks. This means businesses could miss any entitlements assigned to other frameworks and tools that are not native to public cloud platforms, such as Kubernetes contexts.
2. Limited cloud capacity: Existing cloud tools typically operate within one cloud platform. Therefore, an organization that uses multiple cloud systems will need to track entitlements using separate tools. This increases the chances of entitlement issues being overlooked. 

CIEM addresses these challenges by finding configuration issues, providing more granular entitlement validation, and proactively monitoring entitlements that could violate the least privilege principle. 

CIEM’s role in cloud security includes: 

1. Continuous assessment: CIEM tools continuously validate entitlements, which means they are able to detect access and configuration issues in real-time, even if the organization’s policies change. For example, a CIEM tool can flag cloud accounts that only had permission to run virtual machines but have now been able to delete them. This may be a legitimate action, but could also be an unnecessary entitlement that needs to be addressed.
2. Automated remediation: CIEM tools enable businesses to automatically update their policies to address new and evolving risks. This way, they can remediate potential issues in real-time and let IT or admin teams intervene manually if needed. 
3. Scalability: Large organizations usually have hundreds or thousands of entitlements across their cloud environments. CIEM automates the process of managing large amounts of applications and dozens of user account and device types.
4. Multi-cloud support: Defining and managing cloud entitlements varies massively depending on which cloud types organizations use and the services they run in them. Every public cloud platform has a specific native IAM framework, while other cloud services like Kubernetes may use individual frameworks to define entitlements. CIEM automatically issues alerts whenever it discovers an entitlement configuration problem. And because it automates entitlement management across multi-cloud infrastructures, organizations do not have to manage multiple tools or access control frameworks to track entitlements. 

What is CIEM? The primary components of a CIEM system are identity rules and security policies. These are essential to cloud infrastructure entitlement management because they govern who has access to specific clouds and workloads.

Although the typical CIEM definition focuses on the methodologies behind the solution, CIEM would be incomplete without including the role a dashboard plays in system management. Using a dashboard, you can see the security policies of your organization, all visible through a single pane of glass.

By combining these components together, you can see which permissions are used for each session. You also have the ability to determine when entitlements are being abused.