What Is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)?
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) discovers and right-sizes the identities and permissions that exist across AWS, Azure, and GCP. In the cloud, permissions sprawl fast, and most identities, human and machine, end up with far more access than they use.
The problem CIEM solves
Cloud IAM systems are powerful and complex. Roles, policies, and inherited permissions combine into effective permissions that are hard to see. CIEM computes what an identity can actually do, then flags excessive, unused, and risky access.
Core capabilities
- Discovery of every human and non-human identity and its permissions.
- Effective-permission analysis across tangled policies and roles.
- Right-sizing toward least privilege, often with just-in-time access.
- Risk detection for cross-account access, privilege escalation paths, and toxic combinations.
CIEM vs IGA vs CSPM
IGA governs access broadly, including on-prem and SaaS. CSPM finds cloud resource misconfigurations. CIEM is specifically about cloud identities and entitlements, and increasingly ships inside cloud security platforms.
Where to start
Browse CIEM vendors and compare Wiz vs Sonrai.
Frequently asked questions
- What is CIEM?
- CIEM stands for Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management: discovering, analyzing, and right-sizing the permissions that identities hold across cloud environments.
- What problem does CIEM solve?
- Cloud environments accumulate excessive and unused permissions. CIEM finds them and enforces least privilege to shrink the attack surface.
- How does CIEM relate to IAM?
- CIEM is a cloud-focused specialization concerned with entitlements and effective permissions, complementing broader IAM and PAM.