As IT businesses embrace the cloud environment, reducing complexity, identity management, and data protection are significant security challenges. According to a Gartner report, 75% of security failures are expected to rise from inadequate identity, access, and privilege management by 2023.
With identity attacks becoming prevalent in the digital world, it is essential to know what is ciem for information technology. Additionally, with multi-cloud adoption comes a host of people and non-people identities. Dormant identities, unnecessary entitlements, privilege escalation are issues that need to be identified and addressed.
CIEM is a solution that helps identify security risks and enforce the principle of least privilege for a safer cloud environment. The article will look at CIEM and why IT businesses should explore this solution.
What is a CIEM Solution?
CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management) is a security technology that helps with tasks around access such as granting, revoking, and administration. In addition, it provides remediation for cloud security risks and enforces the principle of least privilege across a complex multi-cloud environment.
Some of the shared access risks that arise with multi-cloud adoption are:
Excessive Permissions
Traditionally, organizations stored workloads on their servers or data centers. As a result, perimeter protection was a higher priority. With workloads now shifting to a cloud-based system, providing resources with a wide array of permissions has become the norm.
It is not easy to track what identities have access and how they use them. People with malicious intent can exploit these excessive permissions freely granted to users.
Non-people Identities
In a multi-cloud environment, 100s and 1000s of non-people identities are functioning in the system. For example, non-person identities include serverless functions, roles, applications, scripts, connected devices, SDI components, and more.
The dynamic nature of the environment, coupled with other person identities, could leave the system vulnerable to a data breach.
Continuous monitoring and management is another security challenge that businesses have to deal with. CIEM is a technology that aims to provide a solution to these security risks.
How do CIEM Solutions Help IT Businesses?
Strengthen Identities
According to ITRC, in 2021, the number of publicly reported data breaches exceeded the total for 2020. In addition, hackers are becoming more strategic about identity attacks. Thus, as an IT business, you need to shift your focus from perimeter and application security to identity security.
CIEM helps businesses identify security risks and provide remediation before they become serious threats.
Know What is Happening in the System
As an organization running operations in a multi-cloud environment, the solution to your security concerns lies in the answer to the question, “what is CIEM for information technology?”.
You can only manage and improve security when you have clear visibility of person and non-person identities in the system. With a CIEM solution, you can inventory all identities in the system. As a result, you know what every single identity in the system is doing at any given point. You can leverage this information to manage access and permissions better.
Ensure Effective Permissions and Entitlement in Cloud
You need to know what type and range of access identities possess and what they can do with that access. CIEM helps adopt a holistic approach and helps securely manage end-to-end permission for every single identity.
Incorrect granting of user roles could lead to them assuming the identity of other accounts with excessive permissions. Without visibility, one cannot pinpoint the extent of the permissions and their use. CIEM solutions provide you with complete visibility into identities and their effective end-to-end permissions
Protect Data
In the digital world, data protection is a priority for every business. With CIEM’s inventory management and effective permissions and entitlements, you can know what identities can access your data, how they can access data, and what could be done with it.
You could start by accessing critical data, identifying any vulnerability, gaps, and ensuring only authorized access to the data.
Continuous Monitoring and Audit
In a traditional physical setup, where changes to the infrastructure were limited, quarterly audits sufficed. But in a dynamic environment such as the cloud, continuous monitoring and audit are required to identify risks, remediate and restore the system to established guidelines.
With a CIEM solution, you can quickly identify issues such as a change in effective permissions due to continuous audits. As a result, your security team will be alerted about deviations at the earliest.
Identity and entitlement management in a multi-cloud environment is a challenging task. You cannot understand how identities behave with traditional security measures. CIEM is a solution that provides visibility over identities, effective permissions, protects data, and continuously audits to maintain security across the cloud.