Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a specialized security category focused on managing and governing identities, permissions, and entitlements across cloud environments. CIEM tools analyze who has access to what, detect overly permissive roles, identify unused credentials, and enforce the principle of least privilege across AWS, Azure, GCP, and SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365.
As cloud environments scale, the number of identities - human users, service accounts, machine identities, and third-party integrations - grows fast. Each identity carries permissions that define what it can do. CIEM exists to ensure those permissions are appropriate, actively used, and aligned with actual business requirements.
What Does CIEM Do?
CIEM platforms provide deep visibility and control over the identity layer of cloud security:
- Identity Analytics - Maps every identity across your cloud environment, including human users, service principals, API keys, managed identities, and federated accounts. Creates a comprehensive inventory of who and what has access to your cloud resources.
- Permission Right-Sizing - Analyzes the gap between granted permissions and actually used permissions. If a service account has full admin access but only reads from one storage container, CIEM identifies and recommends removing the excess privileges.
- Least Privilege Enforcement - Continuously monitors for permission drift and policy violations. Alerts when new roles are created with excessive permissions, when unused credentials exceed age thresholds, or when privilege escalation paths exist that could be exploited by attackers.
- Cross-Cloud Visibility - Correlates identity data across multiple cloud providers and SaaS platforms. A single user may have an AWS IAM role, an Azure Entra ID account, and a GCP service account - CIEM provides a unified view of their aggregate access across all environments.
Why CIEM Matters
Identity is the new perimeter. Traditional network security relied on firewalls and VPNs to create a boundary between trusted and untrusted zones. In cloud environments, there is no such boundary. Access is controlled by identity - and if an identity is compromised or overly permissive, the attacker inherits everything that identity can do.
The numbers paint a stark picture. Over 80% of breaches involve compromised credentials or identity-based attacks, according to industry research. Phishing, credential stuffing, token theft, and session hijacking all target the identity layer. When the compromised identity has excessive permissions, the blast radius covers the entire account.
Cloud environments make this problem much harder to manage. A single Azure subscription can contain hundreds of role assignments. An AWS account can have thousands of IAM policies with complex inheritance and boundary conditions. Multiply that by dozens of accounts across multiple providers, and manual permission reviews become impossible.
CIEM automates what humans cannot scale: continuously analyzing every identity, every permission, and every access pattern to ensure the principle of least privilege is maintained across the entire cloud estate.
CIEM vs CSPM
CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) and CIEM are complementary but distinct. CSPM covers broad cloud infrastructure configuration - including basic IAM checks like "are MFA settings enabled?" or "do any IAM users have console access without MFA?" These are important but surface-level identity checks.
CIEM goes deep on identity. It doesn't just check whether MFA is enabled - it analyzes the full entitlement graph. Which roles can assume which other roles? What is the effective permission set after all policies, boundaries, and inheritance are calculated? Which permissions are actually being used versus sitting dormant? What privilege escalation paths exist?
Think of it this way: CSPM performs a broad security assessment that includes basic identity hygiene. CIEM performs a deep identity-specific assessment that maps every permission, every relationship, and every risk in the identity layer. Organizations with complex identity environments - especially those with multiple cloud providers, many service accounts, or strict regulatory requirements - benefit from both.
SecValley's Identity Analysis
SecValley's CSPM platform includes deep identity and access analysis specifically designed for the Microsoft ecosystem. Rather than performing shallow IAM checks, SecValley analyzes the full identity stack within Entra ID and Microsoft 365:
- Conditional Access Policies - Evaluates the completeness and effectiveness of Conditional Access policies. Identifies gaps where access is not governed by any policy, detects overly broad exclusions, and flags configurations that could be bypassed.
- Privileged Identity Management (PIM) - Analyzes PIM configurations to ensure privileged roles require just-in-time activation, have appropriate approval workflows, and include time-bound access limits. Detects standing admin access that should be governed by PIM.
- MFA Coverage - Goes beyond simple "is MFA enabled?" checks to analyze MFA enforcement across all authentication flows, including legacy protocols, app passwords, and service accounts that may bypass MFA requirements.
- App Registrations and Service Principals - Audits application registrations for overly broad API permissions, expired credentials, and abandoned applications that still hold active permissions. Service principals with high-privilege Graph API permissions are a common and often-overlooked attack vector.
- Guest and External Access - Reviews guest user configurations, external sharing policies, and B2B collaboration settings to ensure external identities don't have more access than intended.
This depth of identity analysis is where CSPM and CIEM capabilities converge - providing the kind of identity governance that organizations need without requiring a separate standalone CIEM tool for their Microsoft environment.
