What Is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)?
SearchSecurity, Tuesday, May 7th, 2024
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) is a discipline for managing identities and privileges in cloud environments. As organizations shifted from on-premises computing and storage systems to cloud-based infrastructure accessed via the internet, IT and security teams developed this discipline -- a set of practices and processes -- for determining which users can access that cloud infrastructure and for what purposes.
CIEM enables organizations to enable and track which users have permission to access what in the organization's cloud infrastructure, regardless of whether that cloud environment is with a single cloud provider or housed in a multi-cloud environment.
The objective of entitlement management is to understand and catalog the access entitlements that exist within the cloud environment so that an organization can provide users with the seamless and secure access to the cloud infrastructure they require to perform tasks, while simultaneously preventing users from accessing infrastructure that they are not authorized to use. This is known as the principle of least privilege (POLP).
CIEM is one component of an organization's identity access management (IAM) program, and it works in conjunction with cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools.