What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management CIEM?

Understanding Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management CIEM

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) platforms emerged to tackle the explosion of identity and access management complexity in cloud environments. In modern multi-cloud infrastructures, managing who can access what has become exponentially more complicated—environments might have thousands of human and machine identities, each with different permissions across multiple cloud platforms, all changing constantly as applications scale and evolve. CIEM tools discover all identities and their entitlements, identify excessive permissions, flag violated least-privilege principles, and detect unused access rights that should be removed. Advanced platforms use analytics to recommend right-sized permissions based on actual usage patterns and can automatically remediate risky configurations. They're particularly valuable in preventing privilege escalation paths where seemingly minor permission combinations could be chained together to gain administrative access. Organizations typically implement CIEM alongside broader cloud security tools to specifically address the identity and access challenges that traditional approaches struggle to manage.