Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)

SecurEnds
2 min readMar 10, 2021

--

What is it?

Gartner defines CIEM as identity-centric SaaS solution focused on managing entitlements and data governance in today’s hybrid and multi cloud IaaS set-up. Gartner predicts CIEM offers significant advantage over an individual IaaS’s proprietary identity solution. Workloads have been running in the cloud since the last decade or so. AWS, GCP and Azure have replaced traditional data centers and companies continue to migrate their production workloads to cloud at blistering pace. So, what changed? Firstly, we are starting to realize that this cloud infrastructure model necessitates a different type of identity and access management solutions as native solutions don’t cover multi-cloud IaaS model and traditional IGA solutions fall short in their scope. Secondly, business goals and priorities are driving engineering teams to work on initiatives without formal approval and oversight. With IaaS it is easy to spin up an instance, assign various resources. As organizations aren’t centrally controlling these spin offs, any vulnerabilities in this growing shadow IT is a target for hackers.

What are the benefits?

CIEM Benefit # 1: Provide visibility over multi-cloud assets

Discover all identities, service accounts, IAM users, roles and policies within single or multi cloud the IaaS infrastructure.

See the granular permissions held by IAM Users, Roles and Service Accounts. This is important to define least privilege policies.

CIEM Benefit # 2: Provide governance over multi-cloud assets

Enforce least privilege policies across all cloud identities to avoid privilege creep. 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) reported that 77% of cloud breaches involved credentials.

Routine audits of configurations across cloud environments helps with policy enforcement and compliance.

CIEM Benefit # 3: Provide remediation over multi-cloud assets

Post identity review kick off automation to rectify privileges

Why SecurEnds CIEM ?

Many CIEM solutions are not constructed holistically. Vendors with legacy IAM and IGA solution are creating one off solutions . Managing identity and access in the cloud requires a much broader contextual understanding of an organization’s cloud environments and the various complex policy layers that determine access and permissions. Check out SecurEnds CIEM solution.

--

--