# What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)?

> Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) is an industry category for discovering, analyzing, and governing permissions across cloud infrastructure.

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## Content

It examines human, service, workload, and federated identities together with roles, groups, policies, resource rules, conditions, and organizational boundaries to determine what each identity can effectively do — not merely what one policy document appears to allow.

CIEM is intended to make complex authorization relationships understandable and to support least privilege. Typical analysis identifies unused or excessive permissions, dormant identities, risky privilege combinations, cross-account access, escalation paths, and differences between granted and observed use. Remediation may remove permissions, narrow conditions, redesign roles, or replace long-lived credentials, but it should preserve legitimate operational and emergency access.

### Key points

- **Build an entitlement inventory:** Correlate identities and machine principals with inherited, direct, resource-based, and temporary grants across supported cloud accounts.
- **Calculate effective access:** Resolve policy interactions and conditions to show which actions can reach which resources, including indirect privilege paths where possible.
- **Use activity carefully:** Compare grants with trustworthy access logs over a representative period to find candidates for rightsizing rather than assuming “unused” means unnecessary.
- **Govern change:** Assign owners, approve exceptions, test recommended changes, monitor high-risk grants, and verify that removed access is not silently restored.
- **Important limitation:** CIEM cannot infer every business need or observe every use from incomplete logs. Automated revocation without context can break services, incident response, or recovery, and unsupported policy semantics can produce misleading conclusions.

### Related terms

[Identity and access management (IAM)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/identity-and-access-management/>) · [Least privilege](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/least-privilege/>) · [Cloud security posture management (CSPM)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cloud-security-posture-management/>) · [Cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/cloud-native-application-protection-platform/>) · [Privileged access management (PAM)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/privileged-access-management/>) · [Non-human identity (NHI)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/non-human-identity/>)

### Sources

[Gartner: Innovation Insight: Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management](https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/6094027) · [NIST SP 800-210: General Access Control Guidance for Cloud Systems](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/210/final) · [NIST SP 1800-35B: Zero Trust Architecture](https://pages.nist.gov/zero-trust-architecture/VolumeB/architecture.html)

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