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.

Why cloud permissions are unreadable

The reason CIEM exists as a category is that a cloud permission is a computation rather than a lookup. In AWS alone the effective answer depends on identity policies, resource policies, permission boundaries, service control policies, session policies, and role chaining. Ask a competent engineer what a specific service principal can actually do across your accounts and, without tooling, they cannot tell you.

That is the test for whether you need CIEM. If nobody can answer that question, and nobody has removed an unused permission this quarter, the problem is real.

Most findings are not humans

The instinct is to look for over-privileged administrators. In practice the bulk of findings are non-human: service principals created for a project that ended, roles with wildcard actions granted during a deadline, and CI identities with permissions far beyond the one deploy they perform. See non-human identity.

Turning findings into an outcome

A raw findings list from a large tenant is unusable, so the programme matters more than the scan:

1. Start with unused permissions on non-human identities, which are the safest to remove and the largest in number.
2. Use usage data as the evidence. "This role has not used these 40 actions in 90 days" is an argument an owner will accept; "this role is over-privileged" is not.
3. Right-size with a rollback path, because the fear of breaking production is what stops removal.
4. Move the reducible remainder to just-in-time access rather than trying to perfect standing permissions.

Measure the count of identities holding unused high-risk permissions over time. If that number is not falling, the tool is producing reports rather than outcomes.

Where to start

Where to start

Browse CIEM vendors and compare Wiz vs Sonrai.