Cloud Identity Entitlement Management for TotalCloud
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a critical and evolving discipline within modern cloud security that focuses on identifying, managing, and minimizing excessive or risky access permissions across cloud environments.
This security and identity management solution helps organizations control access to cloud-based resources and applications while adhering to the principle of least privilege.
How Does Identity Management Help Secure Your Cloud?
CIEM addresses several common challenges in cloud environments.
Gain Full Visibility into Cloud Identities
Modern cloud environments encompass hundreds to thousands of identities, including users, roles, groups, and machine identities. CIEM provides a unified, real-time inventory of all entitlements across multi-cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, eliminating blind spots and fragmented IAM views.
Remediation of Risky Permissions
CIEM continuously analyzes access patterns and automatically suggests or enforces corrective actions, including:
- Revoking unused permissions
- Merging redundant roles
- Applying time-bound access for temporary tasks
By maintaining the principle of least privilege, CIEM detects dangerous permission combinations such as the ability to assume roles and create new policies. These entitlement chains can enable privilege escalation and are identified before attackers can exploit them.
Identity Lifecycle Management
CIEM improves identity and access management efficiency by automating the discovery of redundant or orphaned accounts, legacy roles, and misconfigured resources. This enables security teams to optimize IAM policies, streamline administration, reduce operational costs, and minimize the risk of human error.
Because manual IAM reviews are often time-consuming and error-prone, CIEM automates entitlement lifecycle management from onboarding through offboarding, enabling security and DevOps teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
Audit and Compliance
CIEM solutions provide detailed insights and reporting for cloud infrastructure access. Organizations can automate compliance checks, monitor entitlement changes, generate audit trails, and demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements and security standards.
Drastically Reduce Attack Surface
CIEM identifies and helps eliminate unnecessary, excessive, or dormant permissions. Examples include admin-level privileges granted to service accounts that need only read-only access.
By enforcing the principle of least privilege, organizations reduce the number of attack paths available after an identity has been compromised.
How Does TotalCloud Assist in Managing Identity Entitlement?
TotalCloud AWS Inventory includes additional CIEM-specific resources that help organizations track permissions associated with identities across their environments.
The Policy Analyzer evaluates these resources against newly introduced insights to identify gaps and security issues in identity entitlements.
Cloud Identity Inventory
TotalCloud CIEM introduces four identity resources within the AWS Inventory, enabling organizations to assess and monitor cloud identities across their accounts.
Navigate to the Inventory tab in TotalCloud and select AWS to view supported identity resources.
Supported identity resources include:
- IAM User
- IAM Role
- IAM Policy
- IAM Group
Using these resources, organizations can identify misconfigured identities and understand the scope of their permissions, helping uncover excessive access or missing security controls such as:
- Administrative permissions (full admin rights)
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA) gaps
- Roles with cross-account access
- Overly permissive trust policies
Security teams can then implement least-privilege access controls by ensuring identities receive only the permissions required to perform their functions.
TotalCloud also helps track identity usage patterns and identify potential risks such as:
- Unused user passwords or access keys
- Unused or inactive roles
TruRisk Insights for Cloud Identity Management
TotalCloud TruRisk Insights aggregates data from multiple TotalCloud capabilities, including:
- Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
- Cloud Workload Protection (CWP)
- Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)
- Cloud Identity Entitlement Management (CIEM)
This unified approach provides a comprehensive view of cloud security posture and identity-related risk.
TruRisk Insights identifies risks stemming from identity management failures, including excessive permissions, weak authentication controls, and long-term inactive accounts. If left unaddressed, attackers may exploit these weaknesses to escalate privileges and compromise cloud environments.
By exposing identity-related risks, TruRisk Insights helps organizations prioritize remediation efforts before vulnerabilities can be leveraged by attackers.
To view identity-related insights:
- Navigate to TotalCloud > Insights.
- Review the available insights.
- Use QQL tokens to filter insights for specific identity resources.
Example: resource.name : "IAM Group"
This filter displays all insights related to IAM Group security risks.
CIEM in Cloud Security
Integrating CIEM into your cloud security strategy helps reduce attack surface, improve compliance, and strengthen your overall security posture.
By leveraging TotalCloud Inventory and TruRisk Insights, organizations gain visibility into cloud identities, understand entitlement risks, and proactively address security gaps before they become costly incidents.