GigaOm Radar for Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) Solutionsv2.0

1. Executive Summary

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) solutions are specialized security tools designed to address the complex challenges of managing identities, access rights, and permissions in cloud and multicloud environments. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud services and embrace digital transformation initiatives, robust solutions to manage and secure cloud entitlements have become paramount.

Essential CIEM functions include:

• Entitlement discovery and visualization across multicloud environments
• Cross-cloud correlation of identities and permissions
• Automated detection and remediation of excessive or risky permissions
• Continuous monitoring of access patterns and anomaly detection
• Policy enforcement and compliance automation
• Integration with existing identity and access management systems

The primary purpose of CIEM is to provide comprehensive visibility into and control over cloud identities and their associated entitlements. This includes managing access rights for human users, applications, and machine identities across diverse cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). CIEM solutions aim to enforce the principle of least privilege, ensuring that identities have only the minimum necessary permissions to perform their intended functions.

Why Adopt a CIEM Solution?

The importance of CIEM has grown significantly due to several factors:

• Increasing complexity of cloud environments: As organizations adopt multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies, managing identities and access rights across diverse platforms has become increasingly challenging.
• The proliferation of identities and permissions: The dynamic nature of cloud environments has led to an explosion in the number of identities and associated permissions, making manual management infeasible.
• Rising security risks: Excessive or misconfigured permissions can significantly expand an organization’s attack surface, making it crucial to maintain tight control over entitlements.
• Compliance requirements: Regulatory standards increasingly demand granular control and auditing of access rights, particularly for sensitive data and systems.
• Shift toward zero-trust security models: CIEM solutions play a crucial role in implementing zero-trust principles by ensuring that access is granted based on the principle of least privilege.

How Is the CIEM Solution Landscape Evolving?

The evolution of CIEM solutions has been rapid, driven by the growing needs of organizations and advancements in cloud technologies:

• Initial focus on visibility: The primary aim of early CIEM solutions was to provide visibility into existing entitlements across multiple cloud environments, helping organizations understand their current state.
• Integration of automation: As cloud environments became more complex, CIEM solutions began incorporating automation capabilities to streamline entitlement management and reduce manual errors.
• Advanced analytics and AI: Modern CIEM solutions leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect anomalies, identify risky permissions, and provide intelligent recommendations for optimizing entitlements.
• Expansion to multicloud support: CIEM solutions have evolved to provide unified management and consistent policies across diverse cloud platforms, addressing the challenges of multicloud environments.
• Integration with broader security ecosystems: CIEM is increasingly integrating with other security tools, such as cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), cloud security posture management (CSPM), identity governance and administration (IGA), and identity threat detection and response (ITDR) for comprehensive cloud security.
• Real-time monitoring and response: Advanced CIEM solutions continuously monitor entitlement usage and can automatically respond to potential security risks or policy violations.
• Support for DevOps and cloud-native technologies: CIEM solutions are evolving to support modern development practices and technologies, including containers, microservices, and serverless compute functions.

As cloud adoption accelerates and the threat landscape evolves, CIEM solutions will play an increasingly critical role in organizations’ cloud security strategies. With the CIEM market maturing, we anticipate significant advancements in the development of cross-cloud management capabilities, deeper integration with DevOps processes, and more sophisticated AI-driven analytics for proactive risk management. Organizations adopting and optimizing CIEM solutions will be better positioned to maintain a strong security posture and ensure compliance in increasingly complex cloud environments.

This is our second year evaluating the CIEM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 22 leading CIEM solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading CIEM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions to make a more informed investment decision.