Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management: Simplifying and Securing Access to Cloud Resources

Entitlement management is a feature of identity governance that enables organizations to manage the lifecycle of identity and access at scale efficiently. It automates workflows for access requests, assignments, reviews, and expiration, which can be challenging in dynamic work environments where requirements change frequently. With the growing need to collaborate with external organizations, managing access becomes even more complicated. Entitlement management can help organizations manage access to groups, applications, and SharePoint Online sites more effectively for internal and external users who require access to these resources.

Challenges faced by enterprise organizations in managing user access to resources

Managing employee access to resources can be challenging for enterprise organizations. Some of the common challenges include:

1. Difficulty in determining appropriate access levels for users and identifying the right individuals to approve access requests.

2. Users may hold on to access longer than necessary, leading to potential security risks.

3. Managing access for external users, such as those from supply chain organizations or other business partners, can be particularly complex. This may involve identifying the specific individuals in the external organization's directories and ensuring access is managed consistently.

The Role of CIEM in cloud security

In modern organizations, managing cloud access risk is complex beyond identifying who has access to what. It becomes challenging to keep track of the entities. Furthermore, the interconnectivity of OT and IoT (Internet of Things) devices with applications and databases increases the risk of inappropriate data sharing. To address this issue, it is crucial to delineate entitlements accurately. However, with numerous users and services, thousands of resources, and millions of entitlements, human teams may need to be more efficient in managing these complexities. The only viable solution in such scenarios is to leverage CIEM and automation to manage entitlements effectively.

Why is CIEM necessary for businesses?

Organizations are increasingly adopting public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to enhance innovation and streamline operations. Many opt for multi-cloud architectures to optimize costs, availability, and choice.

However, cloud resources are highly dynamic, and traditional identity and access management (IAM) solutions and practices must be designed to safeguard highly dynamic ephemeral cloud infrastructure. To overcome this challenge, cloud providers have created native IAM tools and paradigms to authorize identities to access resources in fast-growing environments. Despite this, managing cloud IAM's scale, diversity, and dynamic nature poses significant operational, security, and compliance challenges for Cloud Security professionals.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) solutions address these challenges by improving visibility, detecting, and remediating IAM misconfigurations to establish least-privilege access throughout single and multi-cloud environments.

What issues does CIEM help to resolve?

1. Over-permissions - Cloud operations often make everything available to everyone, which can lead to over-permission. This situation can happen because companies wish to avoid delays in work, or manual processes prevent them from acting quickly to revoke permission. CIEM provides transparency and a simplified approach to managing permissions, minimizing the risks associated with over-permission.

2. Discovery of asset risks - With on-premises systems, it is feasible to track and update permissions manually. However, monitoring and managing permissions for hundreds or thousands of resources can be challenging when these capabilities are extended to the cloud. CIEM reduces the manual workload of monitoring and tracking permissions through policy-based management, role-based access controls, and auditing/reporting to track user activities.

3. Multi-cloud complexity - One of the challenges that CIEM addresses is the complexity of managing a multi-cloud environment. With each cloud service provider's approach to permissions and access, having a unified approach to managing access can be challenging. CIEM integrates these approaches to provide visibility into the entire system.

4. Temporary resource access - Managing temporary resources can be challenging as it requires a dynamic approach. These resources have a shorter lifespan, and it can take time to keep track of them. CIEM offers the flexibility and visibility to manage these resources securely and with fewer loopholes or insecure assets.

Advantages of the adoption of Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management

• Streamlined and improved cloud operations - CIEM can also simplify and strengthen cloud operations. Organizations must protect cloud assets while ensuring that users have the necessary resources to do their jobs and that those resources are used efficiently. Centralizing management of cloud environments allows companies to scale up or down as needed. Additionally, CIEM integrates with existing security solutions and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) systems, providing organizations with a single view of all their cloud-based resources and compliance requirements.

• Reducing cybersecurity risks and IT load. - As traditional Identity Access Management (IAM) can't cover the scope of need in today's complex cloud infrastructures, manual approaches are becoming more untenable and put unnecessary strain on IT teams that could be tackling other challenges. However, leveraging CIEM could help address these cybersecurity risks and reduce team IT load.

• Improved security - One of the significant benefits of implementing Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is security improvement. CIEM allows organizations to control access to cloud-based resources, ensuring only authorized users can access open resources. These solutions provide accurate monitoring and complete visibility of access and usage of cloud-based resources, enabling organizations to quickly identify and address potential issues or compliance violations.

• Comprehensive compliance - Another benefit of CIEM is the ability to help organizations ensure that they use cloud-based resources in compliance with various regulations, such as HIPAA. Accurate reporting and documentation are critical components of compliance. With a granular level of tracking and reporting of all events and actions in the cloud environment, organizations can detect security incidents, breaches, or non-compliance. This capability also ensures that forensic evidence is readily available during audits.

What features should the perfect CIEM solution have?

Selecting the appropriate CIEM solution simplifies cloud entitlement management and makes it intuitive. Some key features to consider when choosing a CIEM solution include discovering all identities, human or non-human, as well as resources and account activities. Moreover, the CIEM solution should be able to analyze all policy types, support both native and federated identities, and provide cross-cloud correlation.

1. CIEM solutions must be designed to facilitate entitlement management in a modern, multi-cloud environment by offering native and user-friendly support across various cloud platforms.

2. To understand complex entitlement relationships, visibility is essential. The CIEM solution should provide a graph view that maps identities to resources, the ability to query entitlements using natural language, and a metrics dashboard to track entitlement usage and user behavior.

3. CIEM solutions should include entitlement optimization features to analyze entitlements and identify unused, overused, or unnecessary entitlements. This information can help organizations create a more efficient and optimized entitlement policy.

4. CIEM solutions should provide entitlement protection by automatically detecting and remedying anomalous and potentially dangerous entitlements using either tickets or automated responses.

5. CIEM solutions should integrate user and entity behavioral analytics (UEBA) to enable threat detection and response. Any anomalous activities should automatically generate a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) alert and be analyzed to detect potential trends.

6. CIEM solutions should assess cloud entitlement policies against industry best practices, standards, and relevant regulations. They should automatically evaluate policies against these requirements and generate gap assessments and recommendations.

7. CIEM solutions should generate comprehensive and consistent access logs to comply with regulatory requirements and facilitate incident response. They should also provide templated reports for regulatory reporting purposes.