Security & Compliance

  • 12 min read

All You Need To Know About CIEM: Challenges, Role, & Pros

Rohit Rao

20th September, 2023

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Within the organization, multiple employees access cloud-based apps and services. However, the lack of proper management in controlling access to these cloud apps increases the risk of security breaches. 

This is precisely where CIEM solutions step in, allowing your IT team to efficiently manage cloud infrastructure entitlements. By doing so, they effectively safeguard sensitive data, mitigating security threats arising from mismanaged entitlements.

But what exactly is CIEM? CIEM, which stands for cloud infrastructure entitlement management, also known as cloud permissions management, is the process of discovering and managing user identities and their access rights, permissions, or privileges in both single-cloud and multi-cloud setups. 

And, CIEM solutions are identity-centric solutions that provide your IT team complete visibility into which access entitlements are in place, aiming to streamline entitlements management across your cloud and multi-cloud environments. 

Additionally, the CIEM solution supports the concept of zero trust security, specifically adhering to the least privilege principle. This approach helps your IT team safeguard your organization's apps, systems, and data against potential threats like data breaches, cyberattacks, and other vulnerabilities that occur due to granting excessive cloud permissions. 

Also, IT and security teams rely on CIEM solutions to implement the principle of least privilege when it comes to accessing cloud apps and services. This practice helps them reduce the overall risk of cloud-related security incidents by ensuring that each user's identity is granted only the specific entitlements necessary for their tasks. 

Now that you have understood the basic definition, it's time to familiarize yourself with the key components. Doing so will provide you with a clear understanding of why your organization requires such a solution.

Key Components Of Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management Solution:

• Identity Governance: The identity governance component in the cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) solution establishes entitlements that specify the access rights granted to each individual within the cloud. This mitigates entitlement-related risks by providing clear visibility into the level of access granted to employees at any given time. 
  
  CIEM solutions achieve this visibility by automating the scanning process, enabling your IT team to continually assess access control policies, rules, and configurations. It maintains up-to-date records of existing entitlements, the actions each employee can perform based on them, and the resources each employee can access within the cloud, all in accordance with the entitlements in place.
  
  Furthermore, after identifying an entitlement, your IT team can determine whether the access privileges granted to the employees meet the least access privilege policy or not. In cases of excessive access, CIEM can promptly notify your teams, allowing them to manually address the issue or automatically adjust entitlements. This process enhances efficiency within enterprise environments.

• Security Rules and Policies: Security policies and rules within CIEM help your IT team determine who has access, what type of permissions, since when they are holding that particular access, and why they have access to your organization's cloud resources. 
  
  However, CIEM goes beyond generic rules and conditions by conducting access assessments with robust tools, including advanced analytics powered by machine learning and user and user entity behavior analytics (UEBA). Furthermore, it enforces rules and policies:

• Security Protocols in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM): These protocols define the maximum level of workload access a user should have at any given time, offering granular control.

• Metric Logging in SIEM: CIEM tracks usage metrics to identify entitlements displaying signs of misuse, prioritizing least-privilege access, and mitigating vulnerabilities due to granting excessive privileges.

• Compliance Management and Certification in SIEM: CIEM automates compliance assessments by continually comparing existing entitlements with security regulations and requirements to ensure adherence. It also detects instances where configuration changes have resulted in previously compliant entitlements falling out of compliance.

• Centralized Management: CIEM solutions utilize a centralized control center in the form of a dashboard, enabling your IT and security teams to efficiently manage cloud infrastructure entitlements across single or multi-cloud environments from a unified interface. The CIEM dashboard simplifies system monitoring, anomaly detection, and increases operational efficiency by automating tasks that were previously manual.
  
  Now, let's move further and discuss how CIEM can be a game-changing solution in modern cloud security. 

Why Is There A Need For CIEM In Modern Cloud Security?

Managing access and user identities in the cloud is too intricate to handle manually, especially on a large scale. Operational security teams/IT teams face difficulties in keeping pace with the rapid expansion of cloud infrastructure. And on top of it, when IT teams rely on traditional security controls and management practices, they struggle to match the speed and adaptability of cloud computing. Additionally, the tools provided by cloud service providers do not fully address the complex requirements of global enterprises.

Dealing with identity entitlements or permissions in the cloud is also exceptionally complex and poses significant management challenges. 

That's why IT managers need to opt for a solution that helps their IT team mitigate these challenges. Managers need to understand that it's not only about evaluating policies and access controls for each identity but also mapping out the specific actions each identity can perform with those permissions.

Also, it's important to recognize that the cloud operates differently from traditional on-premises data centers. The cloud is dynamic and temporary, where resources (SaaS apps or data) don't persist but are instead created, scaled, and removed as needed. Thus introducing access entitlement management and oversight challenges for IT teams. 

This is where cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) comes into play; it is specifically designed to address these challenges and ensure permissions are used appropriately. It achieves this by adhering to the principle of least privilege and adapting to the dynamic nature of the cloud environment.

CIEM is not restricted to this; it offers other benefits as well to streamline entitlement management. So let's quickly look at the benefits your IT team can avail from CIEM. 

What Are The Benefits Your IT Team Can Avail By Using CIEM?  

Listed below are the benefits that your IT team can obtain from implementing a cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) solution in your organization: 

• Enables Your IT team to Automate Actions

With CIEM, your IT team can set up rules to automate actions for specific scenarios, like enforcing security policies. For instance, it can automatically enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) or limit permissions based on user roles.

• Enables Your GRC Team Monitor Compliance Requirements Are Met

CIEM ensures that the permissions of employees are consistently monitored through continuous checks and sends alerts to your team if any violation occurs so that they can modify the permissions of the users accordingly. Also, it streamlines access management across various cloud platforms, keeping these environments compliant and ready for audits.

• Helps Your IT Team Enforce Access Policies By Providing Cross-Cloud Insights

By collecting data about employees across the entire organization's cloud setup, cloud infrastructure entitlement management simplifies the enforcement of access control policies. It also allows CIEM to create a unified audit trail covering all cloud and multi-cloud environments.

Furthermore, CIEM can analyze this data for trends that may indicate suspicious activity. It can also categorize similar users and pinpoint instances where separation of duties and least privilege access are needed.

• Provides Complete Visibility Into Cloud Access Environment

CIEM provides detailed insights into an organization's cloud infrastructure, including permissions and activity within the cloud or multi-cloud environment. This robust visibility helps your IT teams to effectively monitor and manage access controls by knowing who is accessing which cloud resources and when.

Apart from that, CIEM solutions also offer a dashboard that provides your IT team a unified view of entitlements across multiple cloud platforms, streamlining access and privilege control, thereby enhancing identity management. This consolidated view supports risk assessment and remediation strategies.

• Enhanced Your Organization's Overall Security Posture

CIEM solutions are particularly designed to mitigate security risks, here’s how it do it:  

• Reducing Attack Surface: It trims down the vulnerable areas that can be exploited by potential threats.

• Assessing and Prioritizing Issues: CIEM evaluates and ranks security issues, offering recommendations for effective remedies.

• Maintaining Accurate Entitlement Inventory: It ensures an up-to-date record of all existing access permissions.

• Detecting Anomalies: CIEM identifies abnormal cloud transactions that could signal threats like malicious activity, human errors, or security protocol violations.

• Implementing Guardrails: It establishes and enforces rules across various cloud environments to safeguard against security breaches.

• Enforcing Least Privilege: CIEM adheres to the principle of least privilege, a central element of zero trust security.

• Automated Entitlement Management: It automatically identifies and updates entitlements that are misconfigured, unused, or in violation of policies.

• Enables Your IT Team Rightsize Permissions

CIEM simplifies the process of granting appropriate permissions; it verifies the employee’s identity and, as per their role, they are assigned the entitlements. With CIEM, allocating specific resource access based on precise needs and adjusting privileges as requirements change is easy.

Now that you are aware of the advantages that CIEM offers, you may be eager to know what are options available in the market that help your IT team effectively and efficiently manage the cloud infrastructure entitlement. Well, there are numerous options available in the market, but there's one exceptional solution that stands out from the rest of the competitors is Zluri. What exactly is Zluri, and how does it work? To learn more about it, read on. 

Zluri: Your All-In-One IGA Solution To Effectively Manage Entitlements 

In times, when SaaS adoption is skyrocketing, IT teams struggle to gain complete visibility into user’s entitlement permissions. Identifying which users have what access permissions to various SaaS applications and data has become daunting.

In decentralized work environments, it's common for IT teams to grant users more access entitlements than necessary. Moreover, outdated permissions often go unrevoked when user roles change, creating security vulnerabilities. This concern becomes even more critical as companies expand.

However, there's a solution to address these challenges: Zluri’s identity governance and administration (IGA) platform, which helps your IT teams to align user entitlements precisely with their roles and responsibilities over time. With Zluri's impressive features, including access reviews, a data discovery engine, automation tools, and more, IT teams no longer need to worry about inefficient user entitlement management.

So, let's dive into the detailed exploration of Zluri's key capabilities to help you grasp how it operates.

1. Seamlessly Discover Your User’s Data With Zluri’s Data Discovery Engine 

Trying to figure out which users are assigned to specific roles, who has access to various applications and data, and what entitlements the users are granted can be a time-consuming process. This manual approach lacks efficiency and is susceptible to human errors, potentially jeopardizing data security.

Well, Zluri understands the concern. To address these challenges, it has introduced five discovery methods, i.e., SSO or IDP, finance systems, direct integrations, browser extensions (optional), and desktop agents (optional). With the help of these methods, your IT team can gain complete visibility into user access data, including user roles, what level of access permissions they have been assigned, what entitlement permissions are granted, and more. 

Furthermore, with such granular insights, your IT team can conduct access reviews effectively. Also, the process of managing cloud infrastructure entitlements becomes streamlined, efficient, and less prone to oversight, ensuring that entitlements are aligned with user roles and compliance requirements.

2. Automate Access Management & Ensure User Entitlements Align With Their Roles 

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management is not a one-time task; it's a continuous process that starts when an employee(s)/user(s) joins the organization and continues until their tenure ends. 

And Zluri understands the significance of managing entitlements in the cloud at every stage of the user's lifecycle. So, let’s see how Zluri seamlessly manages entitlements in different phases of the user journey, ensuring a secure and compliant access management process from day one till the very end.

• Assigning Access Permissions As Per User Role Upon Onboarding

In order to precisely assign access as per user role, Zluri connects user profiles with their digital identity and transfers all their data from HRMS to its centralized dashboard. So that your IT team can easily cross-check and verify users' identity before assigning new employees access to any SaaS app or data. 

Now, your IT team no longer has to go back and forth or switch through multiple screens; Zluri brings all the employee-related info to a single location. 

Furthermore, to streamline the access granting process, Zluri automates the entire provisioning process. With just a few clicks, your team can grant new employees access, ensuring they have the right permissions to necessary apps. This boosts productivity, allowing employees to start working from day one.

How does Zluri automate the process? Well, your IT team can create onboarding workflows. All they need to do is select users they want to grant access to or onboard and apps (you can even choose from recommended apps option), which all apps they want the users to access. 

Then, your team can take necessary actions easily by clicking "add an action." Here, they can schedule the workflow and more. 

Zluri even provides in-app suggestions, allowing your team to add employees to different channels, groups, or projects or send automated welcome messages. 

The actions can vary for different applications and are mentioned under recommended actions. Once all the actions are set, you can directly run the workflow or save it as a playbook for future use. 

For added efficiency, Zluri offers automated playbooks (i.e., collections of recommended applications for automation) that can be customized for different roles, departments, and designations. This feature streamlines the onboarding of new employees, making it as easy as a few clicks to set up their access.

Note- Apart from that, your team can set automation actions, such as by triggering if and but conditions, they can grant Kissflow access to all the finance department employees.   

• Manages Access When Users Undergo Mid-Lifecycle Transition

In this next phase, entitlement management gets tricky when handled manually. With evolving user access requirements due to changes in role, position, or department or for specific tasks that need to be completed, the IT team struggles to keep track of these changes. 

Also, employees had to wait for days to get their app access requests approved, because the manual method involved multiple steps. But now, with Zluri's automation, this time-consuming process is eliminated.

Firstly, Zluri integrates with HRSM to keep track of employee data. This integration automatically updates and displays employee details on a centralized dashboard. This way, your IT team can easily access and verify employee information without any manual effort.

This streamlined process ensures that access permissions are up-to-date and aligned with employees' current roles and responsibilities. Whether granting or revoking access, your team can efficiently manage user privileges based on the most current and accurate information available.

Furthermore, Zluri streamlines the access request process by making it ticketless. It offers an Employee App Store (EAS), a self-serve solution, which is a collection of applications pre-approved by your IT team. With this self-serve model, employees enjoy the flexibility of choosing any application from the app store and gaining quick access in no time.

All they need to do is raise a request, and the IT team will verify and review their identity before providing access to the requested application. If approved, employees gain access right away. If access is declined, they receive prompt notifications, reasons for the decline, any modifications made, or suggested alternatives for the application, all viewable in the "Changelogs."

• Securely Revokes All The Assigned Access From Departing employees

When employees' tenure comes to an end due to resignation, termination, or retirement, Zluri securely revokes all the assigned access from departing employees.

Zluri understands that even a single oversight in this process can potentially lead to security breaches, jeopardizing data security. So to address this concern it offers a solution i.e. to automate the deprovisioning process. With a simple click, your IT team can easily remove access from employees, ensuring that all necessary steps are taken. This automation ensures that access is revoked in a timely and comprehensive manner, protecting SaaS app data from security risks like unauthorized access.

Furthermore, to automate the process, your team can simply create an offboarding workflow. All they need to do is select the users from whom they want to revoke app access and then they will come across a list of recommended actions (such as signing out users, removing them from org units, and more). 

Your team can choose one or multiple actions at once from the list, a point to note is that these actions will be executed post the deprovisioning process. Once all desired actions are added, your team can run the workflow instantly or save it as a playbook for future use.

3. Govern User Entitlements Thoroughly With Zluri’s Access Review Capabilities 

Lastly, to ensure every user within the organization has authorized access to the SaaS app and data and their access entitlements align with their roles and responsibilities, Zluri conducts timely access reviews and automates the entire access reviewing process. Since manual access reviewing can be time-consuming and inefficient, requiring IT teams to gather user lists, user statuses, access patterns, and all the apps to which users have access.

Moreover, Zluri prioritizes data security and compliance, which are core concerns of most organizations. So for that, also it conducts access reviews and effectively manages entitlements to avoid any potential security risks. 

You must be wondering how Zluri streamlines the access review process. Well, it offers you some unique features that are listed below. 

• Unified Access Review

Zluri’s unified access review feature allows your IT team to identify which users have access to all SaaS apps and data. Where does Zluri get all these insights from? It has an access directory where all user access-related data is stored in one central place. 

Further, with the help of these insights, including whether the users are admins, regular users, which departments they belong to, and more, your IT team can examine users' access privileges and ensure their access aligns with the roles. 

Additionally, Zluri’s activity & alert capabilities come into play to keep things running smoothly. This feature provides real-time information about users' last activities and notifies IT teams about new logins. With the help of these insights, reviewers can make quick and informed decisions during access reviews, ensuring the right people have the right access at all times.

• Automated Access Review 

No more manual headaches with spreadsheets and JSONs! Zluri takes the hassle out of access reviews by automating the entire process. Just head to Zluri, create a certification and select the apps and users you want to review, and rest, the reviewers will review and update you about the compilation via email. 

So, by automating this process, you get 10 times better results than manual methods and save your IT team's efforts by 70%. Now, let’s move ahead and see how it works. 

• Once you have gained access to contextual data through Zluri’s unified access feature, you can step further by creating access rules around these insights. For example, if someone is an admin on Salesforce, you can easily set up a review policy specifically tailored to that scenario.

• Next comes the schedule certification feature, where you can create certifications based on the gathered information. This allows you to take action based on the insights you've gained. For instance, you can use data like last login, departments, user status (active or inactive), and more to make informed decisions during the review process, such as whether the user can carry on with the existing access or need any modification.
  
  With Zluri's context-rich information, your team can confidently take actions that align with your access management policies. It's a smarter, more efficient way to ensure the right access for the right users, all while keeping your data secure. Zluri's automated access reviews and access rules are the key to simplifying your access governance process.

• Secure access orchestration/auto-remediation 

After completing the access review, necessary changes will occur as per the set actions during certification creation. All these actions, like access modification or removal, are part of secure access orchestration. The seamless process ensures access is managed securely and efficiently, safeguarding your organization's data and resources. 

For example, while creating a new certification in Zluri, your team will come across configuration action under which they need to create deprovisioning playbooks and modification playbooks. If the reviewers decline the access permissions, the deprovisioning playbook will automatically run, and the same goes for the modification playbook. Also, for both scenarios, the reviewers need to provide relevant reasons stating why the access permission is declined or modified. 

Point to note-These actions will take place automatically post the review; that's why this process is also known as the auto-remediation process.

So why wait? Book a demo now and witness how Zluri enables your GRC team to streamline identity governance. 

About the author

Rohit Rao

Rohit works in the Community and Marketing Team of Zluri and is a strong advocate of community led growth.