CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management)
What is CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management)?
CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management)A discipline and tooling category that discovers, analyzes, and right-sizes the identities and permissions that exist inside cloud environments.
Public clouds expose thousands of fine-grained permissions across IAM users, roles, service principals, federated identities, and workload identities. CIEM tools inventory every effective permission, map it against actual usage, and surface excessive entitlements — for example, an IAM role granted s3:* but only ever using GetObject. They also detect privilege-escalation paths (PassRole, AssumeRole chains), unused identities, and cross-account trust risks. Outcomes typically feed automated remediation, scoped roles, and just-in-time elevation. CIEM is a core pillar of CNAPP, especially valuable in multi-cloud environments where permission models differ between providers.
● Examples
- 01
Detecting a developer role that can iam:PassRole into a production admin role.
- 02
Generating a least-privilege IAM policy from 90 days of CloudTrail activity.
● Frequently asked questions
What is CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management)?
A discipline and tooling category that discovers, analyzes, and right-sizes the identities and permissions that exist inside cloud environments. It belongs to the Cloud Security category of cybersecurity.
What does CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management) mean?
A discipline and tooling category that discovers, analyzes, and right-sizes the identities and permissions that exist inside cloud environments.
How do you defend against CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management)?
Defences for CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management) typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.
What are other names for CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management)?
Common alternative names include: Cloud entitlement management.