The rise of cloud-native services and multi-cloud environments has created a sprawling terrain of human, machine, and service identities. And each of those identities has specific files it's permitted to access and applications it's permitted to execute on various cloud systems. Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) is the discipline focused on managing those identities and permissions at scale. CIEM helps apply the principle of least privilege by identifying who or what can access each cloud resource and limiting that access strictly to what is necessary.
As more and more organizations build out infrastructure that spans multiple cloud providers and services, the number of identities and entitlements they have to manage grows quickly. Traditional identity and access management (IAM) tools struggle to keep pace with this fluid environment and the resultant complexity. CIEM tools can step into the gap. They deliver visibility into permissions across cloud platforms, help reduce attack surfaces, and support compliance efforts. They also tie into broader architectures such as Zero Trust security.
Why Traditional IAM Falls Short in the Cloud Era
Organizations adopted traditional IAM systems to handle account creation, authentication, role-based access control, and basic approval workflows. But those frameworks were built for human users in static, on-premises environments.
They aren't a good fit for the cloud era.
First, traditional IAM emphasizes user identity authentication but offers limited visibility into permissions across cloud services. It typically lacks fine-grained control over resource entitlements—who or what has which permission, when, and under what context. IAM implementations struggle to manage large numbers of identities and evolving entitlements in cloud contexts.
Second, cloud environments introduce ephemeral identities—service accounts, API keys, short-lived credentials, workload identities—and dynamic permissioning as infrastructure scales and shifts. IAM systems designed for human users and static roles aren’t engineered to handle that fluidity. IAM weaknesses rank as a top cloud security problem as a result.
CIEM offers a bridge between identity security and resource-level governance, and gives organizations visibility into identities and entitlements across cloud services. With CIEM, you can analyze your various user accounts to discover which identities have excessive access, and use that information to enforce least-privilege practices. This can boost your data access governance initiatives by providing a missing layer of entitlement control.
Core Capabilities of CIEM Solutions
CIEM tools deliver a number of foundational capabilities that help organizations manage identities and permissions across cloud environments and protect cloud data:
Visibility: Maintain a full inventory of users, service accounts, roles, and entitlements across multi-cloud infrastructure.
Risk detection: Identify excessive permissions, unused access (so-called permission drift), and risks of privilege escalation.
Least privilege enforcement: Provide automated policy recommendations that help implement access rights aligned with the least privilege principle.
Continuous monitoring: Deliver alerting and remediation workflows to maintain a secure posture over time.
Integration: Plug into major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and link with third-party security systems and governance tools.
Together these capabilities give organizations the means to map what access exists and what it should be—then detect when it diverges and act to correct it.
Benefits of CIEM for Modern Cloud Security
CIEM tools deliver benefits that span security, compliance, and operational efficiency:
Reduced attack surface: Limit permissions strictly to what’s required, reducing the chance of privilege misuse or lateral movement by an attacker after a breach.
Enhanced compliance: Continuous visibility into entitlements simplifies audits and demonstrates adherence to governance requirements.
Improved incident response: Clear entitlement context accelerates investigations and remediation.
Operational efficiency: Automating the rightsizing of permissions reduces manual review workloads and lets security teams focus on higher-value tasks.
These advantages make CIEM an essential element of cloud security for financial services and other highly regulated industries.
How CIEM Supports Zero Trust Architectures
Zero Trust models operate on the assumption that no user, system, or workload should be automatically trusted. Every access request must be verified, authorized, and limited to the smallest necessary scope.
Least privilege is a core tenet of Zero Trust and CIEM provides the mechanisms to apply it consistently across cloud platforms. By mapping all identities and their entitlements, CIEM exposes over-permissioned accounts, orphaned roles, and risky access paths that traditional controls overlook. Continuous verification becomes possible when these entitlements are constantly monitored and adjusted, keeping privileges tightly aligned with user and workload needs.
CIEM also contributes to identity resilience and stronger data security by reducing the chance that compromised credentials can reach sensitive assets.
Rubrik Can Help You Protect Your Cloud
As cloud adoption expands, the number of human and machine identities—and their entitlements—grows just as fast. Without visibility and control, that sprawl creates unnecessary risk. CIEM tools address these challenges by helping organizations identify over-permissioned access, right-size entitlements, and strengthen identity security across every cloud environment. By uniting entitlement management with data-centric defenses, CIEM gives security teams the means to reduce risk, meet compliance demands, and operationalize Zero Trust principles.
Rubrik combines data protection and identity security to defend against modern cloud threats. To learn more or start a conversation with a security expert, contact Rubrik's sales team.