Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management

Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) are both crucial for safeguarding sensitive data and digital assets, and they serve distinct purposes within the realm of identity security. IAM solutions are designed to manage identities and control access across an organization’s entire IT environment, including applications, data, and services. IAM typically focuses on managing user identities and entitlements to ensure the right individuals have appropriate access to the right resources. Conversely, CIEM specifically addresses the complex nature of cloud infrastructure, which often involves intricate entitlements and varied access levels to numerous cloud resources. CIEM solutions like SailPoint’s Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management enhances IAM capability by simplifying the management of cloud infrastructure by revealing what the cloud resources and what specific actions (read, write, or admin) a user can perform so IAM teams can build a robust and secure cloud access model. Whereas IAM offers a broad scope of identity protection, CIEM delves deeper into cloud ecosystems to provide fine-grained control and visibility in multi-cloud environments, thereby significantly enhancing enterprise security postures and removing unnecessary and over privileged access.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) are both crucial for safeguarding cloud infrastructure. CSPM solutions help secure the cloud infrastructure configuration – and help highlight misconfiguration. CSPM focuses on the security policy applied to the cloud infrastructure resource. CIEM focuses on Identity Security. CIEM helps ensure any identity has only the appropriate access. Only tools like ISC with CIEM can help detect if someone in accounting has cloud access. This rich data of what identity – not just a cloud “user” has access to - is the benefit of complimenting CSPM tools with CIEM.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) likewise serve different purposes in cybersecurity and identity management. CIEM focuses on managing and securing cloud infrastructure entitlements, ensuring the right identities have appropriate access to specific cloud resources and actions such as read, write, or admin permissions. CIEM provides a governance framework that helps businesses secure cloud infrastructure access, similarly to how they manage access to other applications and data. On the other hand, SIEM is designed to monitor, detect and respond to security events and incidents across an organization’s IT environment by collecting and analyzing data from various sources. While CIEM is primarily concerned with entitlement and access control within cloud environments, SIEM aims to provide real-time analysis and event correlation to identify potential security threats and ensure compliance. Combining CIEM and SIEM solutions can provide a comprehensive security posture, bringing together robust access management and vigilant security monitoring.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and Cloud Identity and Access Management (CIAM) are both fundamental to maintaining secure and controlled access within cloud environments, but they too serve distinct purposes. CIEM focuses specifically on managing the entitlements associated with cloud infrastructure resources, ensuring that the right identities have appropriate access permissions (read, write, admin) to specific cloud resources. This is critical in a multi-cloud environment where granular control over varied infrastructure resources is required to maintainleast privilege. CIAM, however, is primarily concerned with managing and securing user identities and access across cloud applications and services, ensuring that users, such as customers, have secure and seamless access to the organization's cloud-based services. While CIAM secures access to cloud and cloud applications, CIEM drills down into the details of infrastructure access and grants the 'appropriate' access/granular access to the cloud resources used to build and maintain cloud solutions thus providing a finer level of control over who can do what within the cloud infrastructure. This differentiation allows enterprises to precisely tailor their identity security strategies to cover distinct facets of their cloud operations efficiently.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management is included in our Business Plus suite and available as an add-on to the Standard and Business suites of the Identity Security Cloud. This feature gives enterprises the functionality for governing and managing multi-cloud infrastructure.