What Is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management? Use Cases + Best Practices

Cloud-driven environments are increasingly the norm, and managing who has access to what within your infrastructure is more critical—and more complex—than ever. As organizations scale across multiple cloud platforms, the number of human and machine identities—and their associated permissions—can quickly spiral out of control. Enter Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), a security discipline focused on discovering, managing, and right-sizing access entitlements across cloud environments.​

CIEM solutions help enforce the principle of least privilege, ensuring users and services have only the access they need—nothing more, nothing less. This is especially important as over-permissioned accounts and misconfigured entitlements have become a leading cause of cloud breaches. 

According to a report from Grand View Research, the global cloud infrastructure entitlement management market size was estimated at USD 1.68 billion in 2024 and is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 37.1% from 2025 to 2030. This growth highlights the growing concern over cloud access risks.​

In this article, we’ll break down what CIEM is, explore real-world use cases, and share best practices for implementing CIEM effectively. Whether you're just beginning your cloud security journey or looking to tighten existing controls, understanding CIEM is essential for reducing risk and maintaining compliance in dynamic, multi-cloud environments.

What Is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)?

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a cloud-native security process designed to monitor, manage, and enforce identity and access permissions within cloud environments. Unlike traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems that primarily focus on authentication and access provisioning, CIEM zeroes in on entitlements—the granular permissions that determine what a user, service account, or workload can actually do once inside a cloud environment.

CIEM solutions provide visibility into who (or what) has access to specific cloud resources, whether through identity roles, group policies, or inherited privileges. These platforms continuously analyze entitlements across services like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to detect misconfigurations, overprovisioning, and privilege creep. By mapping out excessive or unused permissions, CIEM enables organizations to right-size access and enforce least-privilege principles—critical in preventing lateral movement and limiting the blast radius of potential breaches.

Importance of CIEM in Modern Cloud Environments

Modern cloud environments are dynamic, decentralized, and inherently complex. Teams spin up new resources on demand, workloads shift, and non-human identities—such as containers, serverless functions, and APIs—outnumber human users. This fluidity makes manual oversight of permissions nearly impossible, opening the door to shadow access and unnoticed risk.

CIEM addresses this gap by automating entitlement discovery, mapping access relationships, and flagging risky or unnecessary privileges in real-time. It empowers security and DevOps teams to respond quickly to access anomalies, reduce attack surfaces, and ensure compliance with frameworks like SOX, HIPAA, and ISO 27001.

As cloud-native architecture becomes the default, the importance of CIEM only grows. It’s no longer enough to know who logged in—security leaders need to understand what each identity can do once inside. CIEM provides that clarity and control.

How CIEM Works

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) may sound like another acronym in the endless parade of cloud security buzzwords—but behind the scenes, it’s doing the heavy lifting to keep your permissions sane and your risk surface under control. CIEM solutions are purpose-built to tackle the tangled mess of who has access to what in sprawling cloud environments. And when implemented correctly, they become the backbone of any strong least-privilege strategy.

Core Mechanisms

At its core, CIEM works by giving security teams deep visibility into cloud entitlements—those fine-grained permissions that determine what users, roles, and services can do within your cloud infrastructure. These permissions often accumulate haphazardly over time, resulting in over-provisioned accounts and silent security risks.

CIEM solutions continuously scan and inventory these entitlements across cloud providers, breaking them down by identity, resource, and action. This allows teams to spot excessive permissions, flag anomalous access patterns, and identify dormant accounts that could become targets for exploitation. Many platforms also offer automated policy recommendations, helping teams right-size permissions with minimal manual effort.

But CIEM doesn’t just surface issues—it enforces least-privilege principles by allowing teams to automate remediation, remove unused access, and establish guardrails that prevent permission creep before it starts. This proactive stance is critical in dynamic cloud environments, where infrastructure and roles change faster than traditional IAM tools can keep up.

Integration with Cloud Service Providers

CIEM shines in multi-cloud environments, where managing entitlements manually across platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP can quickly become a logistical nightmare.

Modern CIEM tools integrate directly with each cloud provider’s native APIs and IAM frameworks. For AWS, this means interfacing with IAM, IAM Roles, and Resource Access Manager (RAM). In Azure, it taps into RBAC and Azure AD. For GCP, it evaluates IAM policies and role bindings across projects and services.

This integration allows CIEM to pull in permissions data at scale, normalize it into a unified model, and provide a single pane of glass for entitlement management. The result? A consistent way to analyze, manage, and enforce access policies—regardless of which cloud (or how many) you're using.

Benefits of Implementing CIEM

As cloud environments become more dynamic, interconnected, and—let’s be honest—chaotic, security teams are finding that traditional IAM tools just aren’t enough. That’s where Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) comes in. It brings clarity, control, and automation to the wild world of cloud permissions. But beyond the buzz, what do organizations actually gain from implementing CIEM? Quite a bit, it turns out, including:

• Enhanced Security Posture
• Improved Compliance and Audit Readiness
• Operational Efficiency

Enhanced Security Posture

First and foremost, CIEM significantly reduces the risk of data breaches by tackling one of the most common and overlooked vulnerabilities in cloud environments: excessive entitlements. These are permissions that go far beyond what a user or service actually needs—and they’re everywhere.

CIEM solutions continuously monitor entitlements across all your cloud environments, flagging risky configurations like unused permissions, overly permissive roles, or access paths that violate least-privilege best practices. This gives security teams the power to proactively remediate access risks before they’re exploited by malicious insiders or external attackers.

By enforcing least privilege at scale, CIEM helps shrink your cloud’s attack surface and mitigates lateral movement in the event of a breach. In an era where identity is the new perimeter, that’s not just nice to have—it’s essential.

Improved Compliance and Audit Readiness

Let’s face it: audits are painful. But CIEM can make them a lot less so.

Regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 all require strict access controls and demonstrable evidence that only authorized users can access sensitive systems and data. CIEM helps you stay ahead of these requirements by offering detailed, continuously updated access reports—down to the individual permission level.

Need to prove that only the finance team can access billing data, or that an engineer’s admin privileges were removed last quarter? CIEM has the logs and reports ready. These tools provide real-time visibility and historical tracking, making it easier to answer auditor questions, pass compliance checks, and avoid costly penalties.

Operational Efficiency

CIEM doesn’t just help you sleep better at night—it also saves time, money, and a ton of manual labor.

Traditionally, entitlement reviews and access governance have required lengthy spreadsheets, endless ticketing workflows, and overworked IT admins. CIEM automates the most tedious parts of this process. From generating least-privilege role recommendations to auto-revoking unused access, CIEM frees up security and DevOps teams to focus on more strategic work.

This reduction in administrative overhead not only improves response time and accuracy, it also helps enforce consistent policy across fast-moving cloud environments. So instead of playing cleanup every quarter, your team can focus on building systems that are secure by default.

Challenges in Cloud Entitlement Management

While CIEM offers massive benefits in reducing risk and increasing control, it's not without its challenges—especially in today’s fast-evolving, multi-cloud environments. For IT and security leaders, implementing CIEM means navigating a landscape filled with fragmented permissions models, ever-changing resources, and limited visibility. 

Before organizations can solve the problem of access sprawl, they need to understand what makes it so difficult in the first place, such as:

• Complexity of Multi-Cloud Environments
• Dynamic Nature of Cloud Resources
• Visibility and Control Issues

Complexity of Multi-Cloud Environments

One of the biggest headaches in entitlement management stems from operating across multiple cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Each platform has its own identity framework, permission structures, terminology, and quirks. What counts as “read access” in AWS might not line up perfectly with the same concept in Azure or GCP—and that’s just the start.

This lack of standardization makes it incredibly difficult to manage access consistently. Security teams are often left juggling multiple consoles, APIs, and policy models, which increases the risk of misconfigurations, blind spots, and inconsistent enforcement. Trying to maintain least privilege across clouds becomes less about good security hygiene and more about staying afloat.

CIEM solutions attempt to unify this picture, but without deep integrations and normalization across providers, it’s easy to fall into the trap of partial visibility and fragmented control.

Dynamic Nature of Cloud Resources

Unlike traditional infrastructure, cloud environments are highly ephemeral. Resources spin up and down constantly—virtual machines, containers, serverless functions, temporary storage—all of which may have identities and entitlements tied to them.

This dynamic nature makes entitlement management a moving target. A permission that’s appropriate today might be irrelevant or risky tomorrow. Manual processes can’t keep up with this pace of change, and static policies quickly become outdated. This results in a growing gap between what access is granted and what’s actually needed, leading to privilege creep and increased exposure.

CIEM has to be built for this reality—continuous monitoring and real-time policy evaluation are table stakes in environments where infrastructure might only exist for a few minutes.

Visibility and Control Issues

Perhaps the most fundamental challenge of cloud entitlement management is simply knowing who has access to what. In complex environments with thousands of identities—users, services, roles, groups—it’s alarmingly easy to lose track of access paths, especially when entitlements are nested, inherited, or indirectly assigned.

This lack of transparency makes it hard to assess risk, audit permissions, or enforce least-privilege effectively. Even identifying over-permissioned accounts can require a deep dive across multiple logs and tools.

CIEM solutions aim to bridge this gap by offering a centralized, normalized view of entitlements, but getting there is often a heavy lift—especially for organizations that are just beginning their cloud security journey. Achieving comprehensive visibility is not a checkbox—it’s an ongoing process that requires the right tooling, integrations, and operational mindset.

CIEM Core Features

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) isn’t just another acronym to toss onto the security stack. It plays a crucial role in modern cloud security by offering visibility and control over who has access to what, across sprawling, dynamic cloud environments. For IT and security leaders, understanding the core features of CIEM is essential to staying ahead of misconfigurations, privilege creep, and compliance risks. Core CIEM features include:

• Entitlement Discovery and Visualization
• Policy Enforcement and Remediation
• Integration with Existing Security Frameworks

Entitlement Discovery and Visualization

One of the foundational capabilities of any CIEM platform is its ability to map out existing permissions and access rights—and do it in a way that actually makes sense. In cloud environments, access relationships can be deeply nested, transitive, and often undocumented. CIEM tools help teams untangle that complexity.

These solutions scan across cloud service providers (like AWS, Azure, GCP) and inventory all identities—human and machine—along with their associated entitlements. The result is a clear, visual representation of who has access to what resources, and under which conditions. Think of it as X-ray vision for your cloud permissions. This visibility makes it far easier to spot over-permissioned accounts, orphaned roles, and unused access pathways that pose unnecessary risk.

{{shadowbox}}

Policy Enforcement and Remediation

Discovery is only half the battle. CIEM platforms also enable automated enforcement of access policies—whether that's adhering to least privilege, zero trust principles, or internal compliance mandates.

When a user or service exceeds policy boundaries, CIEM tools can trigger alerts, revoke access, or escalate for manual review. Many also offer remediation workflows, including just-in-time access revocation, automated role downscoping, and clean-up of inactive identities.

By translating policies into active guardrails, CIEM not only detects misconfigurations but actively reduces risk exposure in real-time.

Integration with Existing Security Frameworks

CIEM isn’t here to replace IAM (Identity and Access Management) or PAM (Privileged Access Management)—it’s here to enhance and extend them.

CIEM solutions integrate with existing IAM tools to provide granular, cloud-native visibility that traditional systems often lack. They also work alongside SIEMs and SOAR platforms to feed entitlement data into incident response and auditing workflows, ensuring a more complete picture of identity-related risk.

CIEM Use Cases

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) isn’t just about drawing pretty graphs of who has access to what. It’s a practical solution to very real, very messy problems that come with modern cloud environments—especially those drowning in identities and permissions. For security and IT leaders, understanding the use cases of CIEM is key to applying it where it matters most.

Managing Human and Non-Human Identities

One of the most critical (and often chaotic) challenges in the cloud is managing both human and non-human identities—users, apps, services, automation scripts, containers, you name it. CIEM provides a centralized way to discover, analyze, and control access across all of them.

For human users, CIEM helps ensure access is right-sized to roles, with automated alerts for excessive or unused permissions. For non-human identities—often the forgotten layer in security—CIEM monitors how services authenticate and what resources they interact with, surfacing risky behavior like token misuse or privilege escalation. It’s a unified approach to identity management that’s flexible enough for real-world complexity.

Supporting Zero Trust Architectures

Zero Trust isn’t just a philosophy anymore—it’s becoming table stakes for any modern security strategy. CIEM plays a crucial role by enforcing least privilege access in dynamic cloud environments, where traditional perimeter-based models fall short.

CIEM solutions continuously evaluate entitlements, usage patterns, and access relationships, ensuring that no identity—human or machine—has more access than it needs. With real-time monitoring and policy enforcement, CIEM acts as a control layer that helps implement Zero Trust “never trust, always verify” principles in the cloud. It also integrates with other Zero Trust technologies to strengthen enforcement at the identity layer.

Facilitating Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures are IT’s version of chaos theory—and cloud entitlements are often ground zero. CIEM platforms provide clarity during these transitions by mapping out inherited access rights, identifying conflicting entitlements, and highlighting security gaps across environments.

With CIEM, organizations can normalize access controls, de-duplicate roles, and enforce consistent policy across disparate cloud accounts. Whether you’re consolidating teams, systems, or clouds, CIEM acts as the identity translator and clean-up crew that helps turn integration mayhem into manageable governance.

CIEM vs. Traditional IAM Solutions

While both Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) aim to control who can access what, they do so with very different scopes, methods, and levels of granularity. 

For IT and security leaders navigating cloud complexity, understanding how CIEM stacks up against—and complements—IAM is crucial.

Scope and Focus Differences

Traditional IAM solutions were designed with on-prem and hybrid environments in mind. They excel at centralizing user identity, managing authentication, and handling roles across enterprise applications and directories. Think Active Directory, SSO, and MFA—great for broad access governance.

CIEM, on the other hand, was born in the cloud. Its focus is narrower but deeper. CIEM zeroes in on cloud infrastructure entitlements—covering identities, roles, and access paths across platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP. It’s purpose-built to handle the dynamic, sprawling, and often opaque permission structures native to the cloud, including machine identities and temporary tokens that traditional IAM often misses.

Granularity and Automation

IAM provides policy enforcement at a macro level—group memberships, RBAC models, and identity lifecycle management. But when it comes to fine-grained permissions in cloud environments (think S3 bucket write access or Lambda invocation rights), traditional IAM tools often come up short.

CIEM shines here. It provides deep, granular visibility into every entitlement—whether it’s a human admin or a CI/CD pipeline service account. It doesn’t just tell you who has access; it tells you how they got it, whether they’re using it, and if they should still have it. On top of that, CIEM tools are designed to automate risk detection and enforce least privilege at scale, something traditional IAM tools rarely handle natively.

{{incontentmodule}}

Complementary Roles

CIEM isn’t a replacement for IAM—it’s a layer that complements and extends it. IAM provides the foundational identity structure and access provisioning. CIEM builds on top of that to deliver cloud-specific entitlement oversight, continuous monitoring, and intelligent remediation.

Together, they create a more complete access management strategy—where IAM governs the who, and CIEM governs the how, where, and why. When properly integrated, they help organizations strike the balance between agility and control in a cloud-first world.

Best Practices for CIEM Implementation

Rolling out a CIEM solution isn’t just about plugging it into your environment and calling it a day. To unlock its full value—and actually reduce risk—you need a thoughtful, consistent implementation strategy. For IT and security leaders, that means embracing best practices that make CIEM an active part of your access governance program, not just another tool collecting dust.

Conducting Regular Entitlement Reviews

Cloud environments are dynamic by nature. Roles shift, services evolve, and entitlements accumulate. That’s why regular entitlement reviews are critical to maintaining least privilege access and avoiding permission bloat.

CIEM tools can help automate these reviews by surfacing unused or excessive permissions and flagging anomalies. But the human element still matters. Teams should establish a cadence—monthly, quarterly, or after key org changes—for reviewing access across cloud accounts and ensuring it aligns with current responsibilities.

These reviews aren’t just a compliance checkbox—they’re your front line in identifying shadow access, misconfigured roles, and risky privilege escalation paths before they’re exploited.

Implementing Least Privilege Access

Let’s be honest: “least privilege” sounds good in theory, but in the real world, it often gets sacrificed for speed. CIEM helps bridge that gap by enabling organizations to grant only the access users and services truly need—and nothing more.

That means starting with minimal entitlements and using CIEM’s usage insights to gradually elevate permissions if necessary, rather than defaulting to broad access from day one. Some platforms even offer role recommendations based on real-world behavior, taking the guesswork out of access design.

Done right, least privilege access isn’t just a best practice—it’s a living, adaptive policy that evolves with your infrastructure.

Continuous Monitoring and Alerting

CIEM isn’t a one-and-done scanner—it’s a continuous control layer. To fully realize its value, you need real-time monitoring and alerting that catches entitlement drift, privilege escalations, and unusual activity the moment they happen.

By integrating CIEM with SIEM or SOAR platforms, organizations can enrich incident response with context about who accessed what—and whether they should have. This proactive visibility turns CIEM from a passive tool into an active line of defense.

CIEM and the Future of Cloud Security

As cloud environments become more complex and identities more distributed, the role of Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management is shifting from helpful add-on to strategic necessity. For IT and security leaders, understanding where CIEM is headed helps position your organization to stay secure in an increasingly dynamic threat landscape.

Evolving Threat Landscapes

Cloud threats aren’t just multiplying—they’re mutating. From lateral movement via over-permissioned service accounts to privilege escalations hiding in plain sight, attackers are getting smarter about exploiting identity and access gaps. CIEM is designed to adapt to this evolving threat landscape.

Unlike static access control systems, CIEM continuously maps and monitors entitlements in real time. As new services spin up or roles change, CIEM dynamically identifies risky configurations, unused permissions, and misaligned privileges—before attackers can take advantage of them. It’s not just about visibility; it’s about staying one step ahead in an environment where change is constant.

Integration with AI and Machine Learning

As CIEM matures, its future is undeniably intertwined with AI and machine learning. Forward-looking solutions are already beginning to use AI to detect anomalous access behaviors, predict entitlement needs based on peer groups or usage patterns, and even automate remediation without human intervention.

This means your CIEM platform could soon recommend or revoke permissions proactively, long before a misconfiguration becomes a vulnerability. AI-driven CIEM also reduces alert fatigue by highlighting the most relevant risks—cutting through the noise and giving security teams actionable insights, fast.

Role in Comprehensive Cloud Security Strategies

CIEM isn’t a silver bullet—but it’s a foundational piece in a modern, layered cloud security strategy. It complements tools like IAM, PAM, CSPM, and SIEM, offering a specialized lens on access and entitlements that those platforms often lack.

By integrating with your broader security stack, CIEM enhances visibility, reduces attack surface, and ensures that identity risk is addressed across the entire cloud lifecycle. As organizations embrace Zero Trust, CIEM becomes the connective tissue that enforces least privilege and access governance at scale.

The future of cloud security is identity-centric—and CIEM is right at the center of it.

Support CIEM Implementation with Lumos

As organizations double down on cloud-first strategies, identity and access governance has become more complex—and more critical—than ever. Traditional IAM tools weren’t built for the scale and dynamism of today’s cloud environments. That’s where Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management comes in.

CIEM provides the deep, granular visibility and real-time control needed to manage entitlements across sprawling cloud services. From discovering risky permissions to enforcing least-privilege access and automating remediation, CIEM is essential for reducing attack surfaces, ensuring compliance, and supporting secure digital transformation.

But it’s not just about managing complexity—it’s about building a more adaptive, efficient, and secure identity layer in the cloud.

That’s where Lumos comes in.

Lumos is more than a CIEM solution—it’s an Autonomous Identity platform that brings together identity governance, access management, and policy enforcement into one seamless, automated experience. Lumos helps organizations go beyond the limitations of traditional IGA with real-time access visibility, automated reviews, and least-privilege access controls designed for modern cloud and hybrid environments.

In a world where identities are the new perimeter and cloud access is a moving target, Lumos gives you the visibility, intelligence, and automation needed to stay ahead of threats while scaling securely.

Ready to take your cloud IGA strategy to the next level? Book a demo with Lumos today and start simplifying your identity stack.