What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitled Management (CIEM)?
Published: 2023-09-05 15:02:33

![What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitled Management (CIEM)?](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*qtelS6T-80vsjCpjQNZR_g.png)

### What is CIEM?

CIEM, or Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management, is an automated process for managing user privileges, identities, and entitlements in cloud and multi-cloud environments. It applies the principle of least privilege access to cloud resources to analyze and reduce security risks associated with excessive entitlements. CIEM is integral to Cloud Posture Security Management (CPSM) and cloud infrastructure’s identity and access management.

### Why is CIEM Necessary?

CIEM is essential because traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions struggle to adapt to the dynamic, multi-cloud environment. CIEM solutions help security teams gain deep visibility into user entitlements, automate detection and remediation of IAM issues, and enforce least-privilege access, enhancing overall cloud security.

### Benefits of CIEM:

* Complete Visibility: CIEM offers comprehensive visibility, allowing security teams to assess resource access and identify potential risks.

* DevOps Efficiency: It ensures least-privilege access without disrupting DevOps processes.

* Improved Identity Management: CIEM identifies and manages inactive identities, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.

* Cross-Cloud Management: CIEM simplifies identity management across multi-cloud environments.

* Behavior Analysis: It analyzes user behavior to grant permissions appropriately and identifies potential threats.

* Threat Detection and Mitigation: CIEM automatically detects and addresses threats, including insider threats and malicious activities.

* Enhanced Security Posture: It reduces the attack surface and maintains a correct inventory of entitlements.

### Choosing the Right CIEM Solution:

* The right CIEM solution should provide complete visibility, proper discovery, cross-platform support, entitlement optimization, threat analysis and response, entitlement protection, security posture analysis, and logging and reporting functionality.

### Cloud IAM Challenges:

* Challenges include the vast and diverse nature of the cloud, maintaining a single identity across multi-cloud environments, the dynamic nature of the cloud, different approaches to IAM from different cloud providers, excessive privilege, and poor security practices.

### CIEM Lifecycle:

The CIEM lifecycle consists of stages like discovery of accounts and entitlements, cross-cloud entitlement correlation, entitlement visualization, entitlement optimization, entitlement protection, entitlement detection, and entitlement remediation.

### How Can CloudDefense.AI Help?

CloudDefense.AI offers a CIEM solution that automates detection and analysis of cloud entitlements and privileges, enforces the principle of least privilege, provides complete visibility, and offers agentless onboarding. It integrates with DevOps processes, ensures consistent policies across multiple cloud environments, and supports compliance with various standards.

### FAQs:

* CIEM is not a category of IAM but serves as a platform for implementing IAM in the cloud.

* The primary difference between CIEM and PAM lies in their focus, with CIEM managing entitlements and identities and PAM controlling access and monitoring user activity.

* The three primary categories of IAM are access management, authentication, and administration.

* Entitlement management automates access assignment, expiration, and access request workflows.

### Conclusion:

CIEM, exemplified by CloudDefense.AI’s solution, addresses the challenges of managing entitlements and identities in the cloud, enforcing security policies, and enhancing overall cloud security posture. It is a crucial component in ensuring secure cloud operations in today’s dynamic and multi-cloud environments.