Benefits of Using the Right CIEM Solution and How To Choose
Protecting organizations from possible breaches
Cloud provides flexibility which opens new opportunities for organizations, but managing the right access is no easy feat. Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) helps your organization with the right access. It ensures that only authorized users can access the resources available in your organization’s cloud environment.
This underrated practice can protect your organization from possible breaches, protect against damage to intellectual property, and help keep you in compliance.
Top 5 Benefits of Using the Right CIEM Solution
To provide further insight on the subject, here are six benefits that organizations can obtain by subscribing to a reliable CIEM tool. Let us understand them one by one.
Improved Visibility and Reduced Risks
CIEM provides a single dashboard offering a detailed view of all user entitlements across the cloud environment. This eliminates the need to manually track permissions in different cloud platforms, significantly improving visibility.
With the ability to show excessive and inappropriate user permissions across the cloud environments, organizations can prioritize critical issues and then take the required action before they get exploited by attackers.
Compliance
CIEM tools can configure and manage your cloud environments based on required compliance regulations like GDPR, IAM, ISO, and others. Because these regulations often require specific data access controls, CIEM solutions can help you meet these requirements by providing specific tools to monitor and enforce access policies.
These solutions often generate detailed reports about user activities, making it easier to demonstrate compliance at the time of audit. This further simplifies the compliance process and reduces the risks of regulatory penalties.
Seamless Integration
CIEM solutions can integrate with other security tools like SIEM and CASB and foster a unified security posture by allowing data exchange and coordinated responses to security events across different platforms.
This ability of solutions to integrate with other security tools benefits organizations in correlating user entitlements with security events and gaining a more comprehensive understanding of potential threats and their root causes.
Cost-Effectiveness
With benefits such as improved visibility, reduced risk, least privilege, and others, CIEM can also prevent costly security breaches. This provides significant financial savings associated with data loss, remediation efforts, and reputational damage.
CIEM automates many tasks such as monitoring, risk assessment, and reporting and frees up IT resources with improved efficiency and cost savings.
Right-Sized Permissions
CIEM solutions unleash the power to implement the principle of least privilege to organizations, granting users only required permissions to perform their tasks. This reduces the attack surface and threat to cloud accounts caused due to excessive permissions.
How to Select the Right CIEM Solution for Your Organization
Selecting the right CIEM tool requires you as an organization to carefully consider specific needs and capabilities offered by different vendors. We have built and explained this checklist to help you select the most suitable CIEM solution for your organization.
Understand Your Requirements
Start with analyzing your cloud usage across cloud providers and platforms. This will help you define the level of sensitivity associated with various data types stored in the cloud. Based on the sensitivity of your data, you can determine the compliance regulations your organization is adhering to, such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, or any other.
Analyzing these details will help you define the level of granularity you require to manage user access and entitlements.
Request Demo and Proof of Concepts (POCs)
You should never step back from experiencing how a solution addresses your specific needs and workflow. Requesting a demo is always helpful. Demos help you assess the usability, intuitiveness, and reporting capabilities of the CIEM solution.
Further, integrating the solution in a test environment gives you more idea about the effectiveness and efficiency of the product with your existing infrastructure.
Evaluate Available Solutions
Find and list the various options available and compare their features, functionality, and the supported cloud platform. We suggest trying to evaluate solutions that support all three major clouds—AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Below is a small list that you should consider while comparing solutions:
- Entitlement discovery and inventory: Ability to identify all user permissions across your cloud environment.
- Risk assessment and prioritization: The solution’s ability to evaluate potential risks associated with excessive or inappropriate entitlements.
- Remediation capabilities: Options to automate or streamline the process of correcting excessive permissions.
- Compliance reporting: Ability to generate reports demonstrating required compliance regulation.
- Ability to integrate with existing tools: Although this is not a recommended best practice. But, if you do not want to remove your existing security infrastructure, check if the tools you’re evaluating support existing security infrastructure.
- Just-in-time access: Use time-limited permissions with user-friendly request processes, automated workflows, and thorough auditing for effective access management.
Customer Reviews and References
The internet is full of voices. Research online reviews, and read case studies to understand the real-world experiences of users using the selected CIEM solution. Exploring these things will help you understand and address aspects like vendor support, solution effectiveness, ease of use, and overall customer satisfaction.
Of course, you can dig deeper to evaluate this list further. But we have tried to help you get started on your journey to selecting the right CIEM solution for your organization.
In addition to the above list, we also recommend that you put yourself first. How? Evaluate the future growth possibilities of your organization and adapt a solution that will be able to meet your goals. Choose a vendor that has a strong reputation for customer support and has readily available resources for troubleshooting and training.
Compare Pricing and Licensing Model
Remember, different organizations have different pricing structures. Understand what pricing structure is offered to you—including subscription pricing, user-based pricing, or number of cloud accounts.
We recommend selecting a tool that fits your budget constraints, and you get the best security features with scalability for future growth.
To Conclude
Cloud computing offers agility and scalability, but securing cloud environments requires true vigilance. Compliance is the foundation, thus ensure you play by the rules to avoid hefty fines and reputational damage that comes with it.
CIEM acts as your guardian by providing visibility and control over who has access to what, preventing breaches, and protecting sensitive data. We recommend keeping both compliance and CIEM to build a robust security posture, navigate the cloud landscape with confidence, and ensure your valuable data remains safe.
Cloudanix CIEM analyzes the risks deeply yet at scale. Some toxic combinations of permissions may happen and are impossible to detect manually. Cloudanix identifies these toxic combinations and alerts in real-time before an unintended entitlement can cause potential damage, while providing suggestions for remediation that include but are not limited to policy corrections integrated across workflows. Teams can facilitate this information and can rapidly mitigate threats.
