Navigating Complex Cloud Environments with CIEM

By: Becca Gomby

Sep 27, 2024

Securing complex cloud environments is as crucial as it is challenging. The surface area for attack is vast. With the elastic nature of cloud resources, a single compromised service could allow attackers to take over large portions of your infrastructure, often lurking undetected for extended periods. This presents a significant risk to your organization, as your dynamic and ever-evolving cloud environment makes it difficult to maintain control over who has access to what. Permission sprawl—the accumulation of excessive and unused access rights—compounds this challenge, increasing the likelihood of unauthorized access.

Enter cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), a critical tool for tackling this complexity. CIEM helps organizations providing comprehensive visibility and control over cloud permissions. Gartner includes CIEM within the cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) to provide a unified security framework that manages identity and access risks across multi-cloud environments. This integration enhances security by enforcing least privilege principles, automating entitlement management, and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. CIEM safeguards systems against unauthorized access and streamlines identity governance across multi-cloud environments.

In this article, we will cover why CIEM is a vital part of modern cloud environments. We’ll compare CIEM with some alternative approaches, then look at its core functions and implementation challenges. Finally, we’ll explore the benefits CIEM brings to security teams.

Why CIEM Is Crucial in Modern Cloud Environments

CIEM is essential in modern cloud environments because it offers critical visibility and control over cloud identities and entitlements, ensuring that permissions are properly managed while minimizing risks and identity threats. Effectively managing access to modern cloud environments requires a strong understanding and diligent execution of permission and access management at a very granular level. However, this is extremely difficult to do in a dynamic environment with nonstop changes.

  • The organization hires new employees who need new access to different resources.
  • Employees switch teams, requiring a rework of their permissions and accesses.
  • New projects require access to additional cloud resources.
  • Sunsetting an old project means shutting down access to various cloud resources.

Instead of a manual or human-directed approach—which is time-consuming and error-prone—organizations lean on CIEM to manage these concerns. CIEM offers a methodology and framework for all the difficult tasks, including:

  • Enforcing the principle of least privilege
  • Detecting anomalies
  • Automating remediation
  • Ensuring the proper management of access rights
  • Ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements

CIEM vs. IAM

Cloud providers already offer identity and access management (IAM) services, but that’s not the same thing as CIEM. It’s important to understand how CIEM is different.

IAM is a set of policies and APIs that grant granular permissions to operate on cloud resources to principals (user, groups, or services). Typically, IAM services from major cloud providers offer capabilities such as:

  • User management
  • Single sign-on
  • Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
  • Audit logging

CIEM, however, focuses much more on anomaly detection, granular management of access rights, and the automation of entitlement management. In addition, CIEM can provide a cross-cloud layer on top of IAM services from multiple cloud providers. This single pane of glass gives organizations better visibility into user permissions across clouds.

Permissions vs. Entitlements

In the IAM world, you often see the term permissions. This term refers to the specific actions—such as reading, writing, or deleting data—that a user or role can perform on a resource. Permissions are granular, dictating exactly which operations are allowed on a given resource.

Contrast this with the term entitlements that you encounter in the CIEM world. Entitlements provide a comprehensive view of all access rights and permissions assigned to a user or role. Entitlements encompass access across various resources and systems, offering a holistic perspective of access and capabilities within an environment.

Core Functions of CIEM

Let’s look at what CIEM brings to the table by exploring its core functions.

  • Visibility and monitoring: Real-time visibility into cloud entitlements enables organizations to monitor and manage access permissions effectively.
  • Granular access control for multi-cloud environments: Fine-tuned control over access across various cloud platforms allows organizations to enforce precise permissions and policies, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and ensuring consistent security standards regardless of the cloud provider.
  • Role optimization and right-sizing: Ensuring roles are optimized for least privilege access helps minimize security risks by granting users only the permissions necessary for their jobs. This significantly reduces the damage of accidental or malicious unauthorized access to resources.
  • Managing ephemeral cloud resources: Handling dynamic and temporary cloud resources with efficiency and automation means granting and/or revoking access of authorized users and services as cloud resources are provisioned and destroyed.
  • Comprehensive management of entitlements: Thoroughly overseeing all access permissions to ensure security and compliance across the organization is highly useful. This is especially true in areas like continuously monitoring, auditing, and adjusting entitlements to align with evolving business needs and regulatory requirements.

Challenges in Implementing CIEM

Although CIEM can help your organization address a complex set of problems, implementing it properly is challenging. Enterprises looking into CIEM should keep the following challenges in mind.

Complexity of cloud environments

The sheer complexity and huge surface area of cloud services and APIs present a massive challenge. To implement CIEM effectively, you need to use robust tools to help you:

  • Manage and monitor resources
  • Develop comprehensive strategies for oversight and control
  • Ensure continuous evaluation and adjustment of security measures
  • Integrate automation to streamline processes and reduce manual errors.

Integration with existing systems

Ensuring CIEM works well with current security tools demands meticulous planning and execution. You’ll need to perform the following prerequisite tasks:

  • Assess and document existing tools
  • Define integration requirements
  • Verify compatibility
  • Design a comprehensive integration plan
  • Map out data flows
  • Configure and customize settings
  • Conduct thorough integration and security testing
  • Implement the integration in phases

User resistance

Introducing CIEM into your system and processes is important for your security posture, but it can also be disruptive to users and developers. You may face stiff resistance. Therefore, a successful CIEM rollout will require you to:

  • Engage in open communication with all stakeholders
  • Clearly explain the benefits and necessity of CIEM
  • Gather and address concerns from all stakeholders
  • Provide adequate training and support
  • Implement changes gradually to minimize disruption
  • Continuously seek feedback to adjust and improve as needed.

This may seem like a lot, but these key actions will also help to make sure your CIEM rollout is set up for success.

Benefits of CIEM for Security Teams

While its implementation may be challenging, CIEM brings significant benefits to security teams, helping enterprises maintain a strong security posture.

Enhanced security

CIEM provides granular control over who can access what within cloud environments. It enables security teams to enforce strict access policies. This leads to a significant reduction in unauthorized access issues. That translates to fewer security incidents and data breaches.

Visibility

CIEM is a framework of methodologies, best practices, and tools that are essential to minimize identity threats and breaches in multi-cloud environments, offering contextualized visibility and control over entitlement and permissions, minimizing risks, and stopping identity-based threats.

Reduced risk

By continuously monitoring and managing cloud entitlements, CIEM helps in identifying and mitigating potential security risks before they can be exploited. According to a recent Gartner Peer Insights report, 84% of organizations have experienced an identity-related breach. Inadequate management of identities, access, and privileges lead to these breaches. CIEM is instrumental in combating this trend.

Compliance

Compliance with data privacy and protection regulations is a mandatory requirement for large enterprises. CIEM tools simplify the process of aligning cloud access controls with industry regulations and standards. This ensures that organizations can easily demonstrate compliance during audits to maintain customer trust while simultaneously avoiding legal exposure, fines, or penalties.

Operational efficiency

CIEM allows security teams to manage cloud access rights more efficiently, removing the time and effort that would ordinarily have been spent on manual entitlement reviews. Automated processes and centralized management contribute to faster decision-making and improved productivity.

Prevention of entitlement sprawl

CIEM tools continuously monitor your cloud systems to identify and remove unused or excessive access rights, preventing entitlement sprawl. This proactive approach helps maintain a clean and secure access landscape, reducing the attack surface and potential points of vulnerability.

By automating entitlement management and enforcing least privilege principles, CIEM helps organizations maintain a secure and compliant infrastructure, reducing the attack surface and preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data and resources.  This is particularly crucial in multi-cloud setups, where managing diverse and complex permissions manually across multiple tools and clouds can lead to significant security gaps

Conclusion

The cloud landscape is complex, characterized by rapid innovation in areas such as blockchain and GenAI. These advancements significantly increase the threats to your cloud infrastructure.  Consequently, managing entitlements has become a top priority in cybersecurity, ensuring that permissions are appropriately assigned and monitored to safeguard against unauthorized access, identity-based threats, and potential breaches.

One of the most common attack vectors for cloud applications is overly permissive roles and identities. To combat this, it is crucial to integrate with your cloud service provider (CSP) to gain complete visibility into all identities, roles, and the permissions/entitlements assigned to them. Pr-cloud IAM analyzers resolve the complex hierarchies unique to each CSP, such as the ones from AWS, Azure, and GCP, to calculate the complete and accurate set of permissions granted to each IAM entity. Panoptica’s CIEM excels providing a comprehensive view of all identities and their risks, ensuring robust security across your cloud infrastructure. Its detailed analytics, attack path analysis, and advanced CIEM capabilities allow precise management of entitlements, reducing the risk of unauthorized access, identity-based threats, and cloud breaches.  

By automating entitlement management and enforcing least privilege principles, CIEM helps organizations maintain a secure and compliant infrastructure, reducing the attack surface and preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data and resources.  This is particularly crucial in multi-cloud setups, where managing diverse and complex permissions manually across multiple tools and clouds can lead to significant security gaps. CIEM helps organizations manage entitlements in a fine-grained manner, to establish a strong security posture and maintain compliance amidst the dynamism of modern-day operations and scale.

Panoptica is an all-in-one CNAPP with robust CIEM capabilities built in. This integrated solution not only enhances visibility and control over your cloud environments, but also streamlines the management of permissions and identities, significantly reducing security risks and stopping identity-based threats. By integrating security measures throughout the development lifecycle, Panoptica helps maintain a secure and compliant cloud infrastructure.

Are you ready to enhance your cloud security with Panoptica? Learn more about how Panoptica can safeguard your cloud-native applications. Sign up for a free trial or schedule a demo today. Experience the comprehensive protection and peace of mind that CIEM with Panoptica offers.

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