Engineering
Security
What is CIEM?
As organizations accelerate their shift to the cloud, they’re reaping the benefits of agility, scalability, and cost efficiency. But this transformation also introduces a new set of security challenges—chief among them: managing who has access to what.
In sprawling, multi-cloud environments, it’s all too easy for entitlements to become over-permissive, misconfigured, or simply forgotten. These are the cracks through which security breaches, compliance violations, and insider threats can slip. That’s where Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) comes into play.
What is CIEM? #
CIEM refers to a set of technologies and best practices designed to manage, monitor, and secure access to cloud resources. It's focused on the principle of least privilege - ensuring users have only the permissions they need to perform their work, and nothing more.
At its core, CIEM is about answering fundamental questions:
- Who can access your cloud resources?
- What actions can they take?
- Are those permissions necessary?
- Are they still valid?
CIEM solutions typically include several key components, such as:
- Identity and Access Management (IAM) - IAM handles the basics: authenticating users and assigning them roles or policies. But in large organizations, IAM policies often grow complex and inconsistent across environments like AWS, GCP, and Azure. CIEM builds on IAM by adding visibility and control.
- Entitlement Management - Entitlements represent the actual access a user has to cloud resources. Effective entitlement management means mapping those permissions to business context—roles, responsibilities, and real usage patterns—and eliminating anything excessive or unnecessary.
- Compliance Monitoring - With privacy and security regulations tightening worldwide, CIEM platforms often include compliance checks and policy-as-code capabilities. This helps ensure that permissions and activity across your cloud environment align with frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR.
Open Source CIEM #
In What is the Modern Data Stack we covered what an infrastructure data lake is and how to build one with CloudQuery. By having an infrastructure data lake you can build your own customizable CIEM with standard SQL queries and views that you can monitor and visualize with your go-to BI tools, avoiding yet-another-dashboard fatigue and the need to learn new proprietary query languages.
Ready to get started with CloudQuery? You can try out CloudQuery locally with our quick start guide or explore the CloudQuery Platform (currently in beta) for a more scalable solution.
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