With a rapid surge in the use of cloud services, organizations have seen a massive rise in cyberattacks in recent years. In 2022, IBM, through its special report, stated that around 45% of cyber breaches happened in the cloud.
Traditional security tools can’t cope up with the unique security challenges and expansion in resource management. Moreover, traditional methods can’t manage an increasing number of permission and identity access, leading to blind spots.
To tackle these security challenges, Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management or CIEM tools have emerged as the best possible solution. It enables organizations to discover and manage entitlements and permissions in the cloud and ensure optimum access control.
However, with so many CIEM vendors in the market, you might be overwhelmed. Thus, we have come up with a list of the top 10 cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) tools in 2024. Along with the list, we will also cover the following aspects that will help you find the right tool with ease:
- What is cloud infrastructure entitlement management?
- What are CIEM tools?
- What should you look for in a CIEM tool?
- A brief comparison of CIEM vendors.
Now, let’s get started;
What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)?
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management is a security solution that automates the process of managing the entitlement and privileges of users and devices across the cloud environment.
The primary purpose of CIEM is to discover entitlement across the cloud environment and prevent any security issues resulting from the higher privilege of entities. It helps the organization prevent excessive privilege by continuously monitoring the access level of entities and ensuring they can only access the resources that they should.
Importantly, it enables the security team and administrators to implement the principle of least privileged access at scale to cloud infrastructure and streamline the whole access management.
The least privilege model helps reduce the number of cloud entitlements a user or device has to a specific resource. With an effective CIEM, you can effortlessly address the challenges of maintaining consistent access control and minimize the overall attack surface by a large margin.
What are CIEM tools?
Cloud infrastructure entitlement management or CIEM tools is a next-generation cloud security solution that helps an organization manage permission and entitlement. This tool provides the platform for you to automate user permission management and ensure no entity has a higher access level than it should.
It continuously monitors all the entitlement across the cloud environment for suspicious or malicious behavior and takes corrective measures whenever there is a deviation in the access pattern. With a CIEM tool, the security team can not only determine user permissions but enforce the principle of least privilege to minimize excessive permission and inherited access.
This tool works across all types of cloud environments and helps them improve the overall cloud security posture while mitigating entitlement risks arising due to excessive permissions. Importantly, implementing the CIEM tool will also help the organization to automate compliance with industry standards and regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and others.
What to Look For in a CIEM Tool?
While selecting a CIEM tool, you need to consider certain factors that will guide you to the right tool your organization needs. Here are the following factors that you need to consider:
Granular Policy Control
The CIEM tool must provide you with the option to define and manage entitlement and access at a granular level. Not only should it allow you to establish the permission but also entitlements and roles.
Security Capabilities
Make sure the CIEM tool comes loaded with all the required security capabilities, as it will ensure a lower attack surface. The CIEM solution must have identity and access management (IAM) integration, threat detection, data encryption, and behavioral analytics.
Comprehensive Visibility
When you get a comprehensive visibility of all the entities and their entitlement across your cloud environment, it helps you in proper access management. It provides visibility of all the users, devices, clients, services, and applications accessing your cloud resources and the level of access they have.
Scalability
Another aspect you should check in the CIEM is scalability. You should check whether the CIEM tool can scale according to your organization's increasing requirements without compromising access management performance.
Compliance and Audit Support
While selecting a particular CIEM tool, it is vital to assess the compliance and audit support it has to offer. The tool must deliver all the required compliance features and audit reporting capability so that it is easy for you to stay compliant with industry regulations and standards.
Ease of Use
When you are getting a CIEM tool for your organization, you will obviously look for a tool that has a user-friendly and straightforward interface. Having an intuitive interface will make it easy for security team members to use them and manage entitlement and access control with ease.
Integration
Assess the integration feasibility offered by the CIEM tool for your existing security solution and tools. Most importantly, it must blend seamlessly with your existing cloud infrastructure without any issues. You also need to make sure it is compatible with the SIEM solution, identity and access management system, and other security technologies.
10 CIEM Vendors in 2024
First, we want you to take a look at the brief comparison of the CIEM vendors we have found for you;
| Tools | Risk Prioritization | Comprehensive Visibility | Automated Remediation or Recommendation | Compliance Support | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CloudDefense.AI | Available | Available | Available | Available | Price is available on quote request. |
| Wiz | Available | Available | Available | Available | Price is available on quote request. |
| Tenable | Limited | Available | Available | Available | Pricing is offered after the demo. |
| Crowdstrike | Available | Available | Limited | Available | The basic pricing starts from $499.95 per year. |
| Prisma Cloud | Limited | Available | Available | Available | Pricing is offered after the demo. |
| Lacework | Available | Available | Available | Available | Price is available on quote request. |
| Orca Security | Available | Available | Available | Available | Pricing is offered after the demo. |
| Sonrai Security | Available | Available | Limited | Available | Pricing is offered after the demo. |
| Microsoft Defender | Available | Available | Limited | Available | The basic pricing starts at $5 per month for each user. |
| Zscaler | Available | Available | Available | Available | Pricing is offered after the demo. |
CloudDefense.AI
CloudDefense.AI 
Without a shadow of a doubt, CloudDefense.AI is an industry-leading CIEM vendor that has been helping organizations notch up their cloud security with a revolutionary CIEM solution. It provides top-notch entitlement management that delivers improved access control, complete visibility over all identities, and efficient, compliant support.
Unlike others, it comes with a complete suite of advanced features like AI rightsizing, risk insight, AI remediation, and context mapping. With this tool, it lets you take a comprehensive approach towards entitlement management and minimize the attack surface.
Features
Let’s take a look at all the critical features that make CloudDefense.AI the best CIEM vendor in 2024:
360-Degree Visibility
CloudDefense.AI leverages Net-Effective permission insight and cross-cloud entitlement management to give you a 360-degree view of entities across your cloud platform. It lets you monitor all the activities and fix over-permissive access.
Custom Policy Implementation
Identifying malicious permissions and fixing unwanted access to cloud resources gets easy with this tool. It allows you to implement a custom policy that prevents all malicious or over-permissive access.
AI-Based Remediation
One of the defining features of this solution is the AI-based remediation process, where it instantly identifies and remediates over-permissive policies. Through automation, this tool streamlines the whole remediation workflow and proactively protects the cloud environment. It also provides AI-based recommendations regarding ways to fix unwanted permissions.
Advanced IAM Insights
Through this CIEM tool, CloudDefense.AI lets you assess IAM permissions, entities, and connections between multiple clouds to provide you insight regarding user-resource interactions. It helps you to assess all the suspicious activities and get complete insight into potential threats.
Context Map
CloudDefense.AI delivers Context Map features through this tool, which helps you get custom insight and perspectives based on user queries and activities. It also helps you to gain insight into dependencies between resources, policies, and users. It also showcases which users have MFA enabled and a list of user's access to specific resources.
Advanced Tagging and Risk Scoring
To categorize and fix the vulnerabilities with the highest impact, CloudDefense.AI also offers you advanced tagging and risk scoring capability. It classifies identified vulnerabilities and assesses their impact before putting the score, and this allows the security team to prioritize their fixes.
Pros
CloudDefense.AI proactively resolves cloud identity issues and ensures optimum security posture.
Remediates hidden permission and over-permissive accounts using an AI-drive remediation process.
Implements principles of least privilege and customized policies to fix unwanted access to essential resources.
Extremely easy-to-navigate interface with well-laid-out controls.
Cons
It can be slightly challenging to use for new employees.
What Sets CloudDefense.AI Apart from Others?
CloudDefense.AI has emerged as a leading CIEM tool in the market, and it is mainly due to the unique features it has on offer:
AI-Based Quick Rectification
The AI-based remediation and rectification recommendation is one of the highlighting features of this tool. It not only streamlines the whole remediation process but also allows security teams to use their resources efficiently.
Advanced IAM Investigation
This CIEM tool also offers advanced IAM investigation to provide you insight regarding user-resource interaction and aid in the investigation of malicious activities.
Advanced Context Map
Leveraging the advanced Context Map feature, you can get a perspective and insight into the user preferences and queries.
Don’t just take our word for it. Book a free demo and witness firsthand the power and simplicity of CloudDefense.AI.
Wiz
Wiz
Wiz is a top-tier CIEM solution that lets you take control of your entitlements by analyzing them and providing detailed insight regarding identity-related risks. This CIEM tool not only detects over-permissive identities but also identifies exposed secrets and provides auto-generated recommendations to remediate the issues.
Features
Wiz analyzes effective permissions to streamline access management and provides recommendations to teams to reduce unused permissions.
It scans all the workloads in the cloud environment to discover risks associated with exposed secrets, weak passwords, and exposed credentials.
This, too, can correlate cloud entitlements with various risk factors to identify toxic combinations and help the team in remediating them.
Enables the team to detect exposure of sensitive resources and recommendations to fix them.
Tenable
Tenable
Another effective CIEM solution that requires attention in your pursuit of the best CIEM vendor is Tenable. It is one of the leading CIEM vendors that not only helps you to address identity and entitlement risks but also IAM misconfigurations across your cloud environment.
Features
This CIEM vendor provides complete visibility into all the identities and entitlements and utilizes automated analysis to identify identity risks.
Implements full-stack analysis to provide insight into cloud providers' access and identity-related risk.
Leverages automated and assisted remediation capability to eliminate risk privileges and faulty entitlements.
Tenable offers Just-in-Time access management, which allows you to manage developer access according to their business requirement.
CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike
With CrowdStrike, it gets easier for businesses of all sizes to simplify their cloud entitlement management and eliminate all potential identity-based attacks. It can constantly monitor and detect account compromises, stolen access keys, and identity misconfiguration to prevent them from affecting the cloud environment.
Features
It provides comprehensive visibility into all the cloud resources and helps in discovering the connection between access and permissions.
Helps in implementing resource-based policies to streamline resource access management that ultimately helps in defining user access levels.
It helps minimize identity-based risk by implementing the least privilege principle and analyzing IAM users and roles.
The identity threat detection and response feature assesses the cloud environment to detect suspicious lateral movement.
Prisma Cloud
Prisma Cloud
Prisma Cloud is undoubtedly one of the best CIEM tools you will come across that lets you monitor permission and automatically enforce least privilege access. Through this tool, you will get complete visibility into effective permissions and insights of users who have access to critical resources.
Features
It automatically calculates all the effective permissions of the user and discovers over-permission access that requires rightsizing.
Prisma Cloud lets audit cloud permissions across the multi-cloud environment with related service data and cloud accounts.
Enables the security to implement a customized policy that helps in detecting faulty user access and provides automated recommendations to ensure least-privilege access.
Integrates with different IDP services like AWS IAM Center and Azure AD to provide you with over-permissive and effective permissions of IDP users.
Lacework
Lacework
Trusted by top organizations throughout, Lacework is a renowned CIEM vendor in the market that lets users monitor identities and entitlement and remediate identities that pose risks. It streamlines the whole process by automatically pinpointing users and services that can lead to identity-based attacks and providing suggestions to minimize the attack surface.
Features
Lacework continuously monitors entities and permission to visualize users' usage patterns and discover excessive permission by leveraging the insights.
It makes use of risk scoring based on role chaining, toxic combinations, usage patterns, and secrets to prioritize the riskiest identities.
It offers corrective measures to grant size permission and also provides detailed evidence related to suggested changes in policy.
It makes attack path analysis of entities that have access to valuable resources and helps security teams to take necessary measures.
Orca Security
Orca Security
If you want to secure your identities and cloud entitlements across the multi-cloud environment, it would be wise to consider Orca Security. It is a one-of-a-kind CIEM vendor that combines identity risk with other risks to help you prioritize risks and secure your entitlements in a holistic way.
Features
Orca Security features an agentless platform that provides you granular visibility into all the entitlements and ensures compliance with regulatory standards.
Orca’s query builder enables you to make advanced queries on identities and entitlement data.
Performs thorough scans across your cloud estate for weak passwords, exposed keys, and other information that hackers can utilize to breach the environment.
It continuously analyzes data for intelligence from workloads, identities, and workloads and identifies risks that can lead to cloud attacks.
Sonrai Security
Sonrai Security
With Sonrai Security, it becomes easy for you to manage risks associated with identities and entitlements while breaking toxic permission chains. This CIEM vendor not only lets you implement the pre-built least privilege access principle but also helps you disrupt attack paths that move laterally through your cloud environment.
Features
It enables the security team to discover unknown admins through its patented analytics feature that lists all the admins in an Identity Inventory for tracking.
Sonrai Identity Insight dashboard lets you maintain the least privilege access continuously and rightsize over-permissive identities.
The analytics and graphing technology helps the security team visualize the relationship between identities and data they can access.
Leverages Toxic Permission Analyzer to discover dangerous permission chains and helps you break them.
Microsoft Defender
Microsoft Defender
An incredible CIEM vendor you will come across on this list is Microsoft Defender. It serves as an entitlement management platform that can cater to small to medium-sized businesses. It is tasked with the detection, investigation, and prevention of risks associated with identities and endpoints.
Features
Microsoft Defender delivers advanced identity and access management to rectify identity issues associated with suspicious activities.
It offers real-time threat detection and response to mitigate any vulnerability that might arise due to weak passwords or exposed secrets.
Microsoft Defender can respond to sophisticated threats through its endpoint protection and protect the resources from misuse.
Zscaler
Zscaler
Zscaler serves as a top contender when it comes to choosing the best CIEM vendor in 2024. This CIEM tool helps you manage all the identity risks by discovering and rightsizing all the excessive privileges in the cloud environment. It is a unique tool that leverages AI and ML-powered analytics along with other advanced technologies to discover risky identities.
Features
AI and ML-powered analytics go through all the entitlements and provide a risk-based view to discover identities with excessive permission.
It offers Posture Control analysis to find unused and misconfigured permissions and risky access paths that lead to important resources.
Helps in enforcing policies and automated guardrails to stay compliant with industry standards and regulations like GDPR, SOC 2, PCI DSS, NIST, and others.
Integrates with the DevOps process to ensure there are no exposed secrets, weak passwords, or faulty entitlements that can lead to risks in the deployment stage.
Conclusion
We know how hard it is to select the right CIEM vendors for your organization when you have so many tools available in the market. Not all CIEM fits all types of organizations, and a wrong choice can lead to hefty financial loss.
Through our top 10 cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) tools in the 2024 list, we are confident you will be able to find the CIEM tool that fits your organization. All the CIEM vendors in this list cater to all types of organizations and deliver all the required features that help the organization prevent identity-based risks and rightsize permissions.
Anshu Bansal, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist, currently co-founds CloudDefense.AI, a cybersecurity solution with a mission to secure your business by rapidly identifying and removing critical risks in Applications and Infrastructure as Code. With a background in Amazon, Microsoft, and VMWare, they contributed to various software and security roles.
