The rate of public cloud adoption has increased in recent years. As organizations move to the cloud, IT personnel have greater responsibility to implement robust security strategies.
Enterprise assets across the multiple or hybrid cloud environment face the risk of attackers each day. Unwarranted access to crucial business information can even lead to the downfall of an organization.
Therefore, organizations must consider the newest and the most efficient security solution – Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM).
Gartner defines CIEM as a unique SaaS solution that focuses on cloud access risk through establishing time-limited access controls. A CIEM platform manages entitlements in a multi-cloud and hybrid environment.
Here is some information on CIEM and how it can help your organization.
Why Should Your Organization Implement CIEM?
The multi-cloud environment has become much more complex than earlier, and increased usage is the main reason behind the growing complexity. CIEM technology uses the least privilege principle to handle identity governance in a complex, dynamic cloud environment.
Using a Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) solution allows users and other non-human entities to access information that they are particularly entitled to at any given time.
What are the Main Uses of CIEM Solutions?
1. Increased Visibility
A well-built CIEM solution provides complete visibility into all entities (human and non-human) that are allowed to access a cloud environment. CIEM analyzes the type of access and time of access of each resource, and this analysis provides information about who is accessing what and when.
2. Enables Automation
The CIEM solution automatically handles permission management across multiple cloud environments. It automatically monitors suspicious activity and activates the remediation plans when any form of unusual activity is detected (such as dormant accounts, activities that are beyond the norm). The solution can also catch mistakes while defining user accounts and resolve them immediately.
3. Handling Compliance Requirements
Organizations face several obligations, data requests, and data requirements from regulators. The emphasis on identity-related issues as the prime controller of enterprise security exists even today. The automated auditing features of the CIEM platform are an excellent way to resolve the compliance burden.
What are the Key Benefits of CIEM?
Apart from efficient entitlement management, organizations that integrate Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) platforms into their existing multi-cloud infrastructure enjoy the following benefits.
- Risk Reduction
CIEM can mitigate two critical sources of risk.
First, it controls misuse or theft of credentials. Poor credential management is a significant cause of cyber-attacks. CIEM solutions, when integrated into the multi-cloud infrastructure, offer better posture assessment and compliance.
Second, CIEM reduces the risk of an insider attack. Sometimes, insiders misuse the legitimately approved credentials and entitlements. CIEM mitigates the risk through on-demand management of entitlements.
- Minimized Costs
The CIEM solutions enable a cost-effective use of cloud computing resources. Using CIEM, an organization can obtain complete information about application resource usage.
This information allows organizations to make informed decisions about adding more capacity or upgrading to a new cloud environment. If the consumption levels are low, organizations can cut down their quota of monthly cloud subscriptions.
- Improved Business Continuity
In case of any business-related disruptions or natural calamities, Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management capabilities aid in continued operations quickly. They help avoid different business disruptions by allowing IT managers to restrict access if thresholds are reached.
As a result, any potential disruption or issue that arises is resolved even before it occurs and affects the continuity of the business.
- Improved Productivity and Better Innovation
CIEM allows the organization to introduce new applications and workloads while all the excessive permissions are automatically taken care of. Thus, productivity is at its peak with a CIEM solution. Since business continues at a good pace without redundancy and other forms of disruptions, innovation continues to grow.
- Clear Distinction of Duties
CIEM separates the roles played by IT administrators and managers. The IT team monitors the consumption of cloud resources. They ensure that usage complies with allotted quotas. The managers gain a complete overview of the resource consumption at the organization level. They provide the proper performance of all processes.
Enterprises using cloud-based services or hosting applications in a public cloud must consider viable options to monitor and manage the entitlements. They must find a commercial CIEM vendor to implement cloud entitlements management solutions that meet their unique requirements.
However, before you choose a CIEM vendor, remember to consider the number of resources to be monitored, the type of data that needs to be reported, and whether or not you need information about the cloud capacity of the solution. This will help you find the right vendor for your needs and budget.
