9 Best CIEM Tools for Cloud Security in 2025

Cloud infrastructure and platform services providers keep adding services, leading to a significant increase in the number of entitlements to manage, which makes cloud infrastructure permissions management challenging.

Person identities are just one aspect of identity management, even as the cloud has witnessed a significant increase in on-person identities like service accounts, roles, VMs, and connected devices, often referred to as machine identities. These machine identities are ten times more than human identities, and keeping an inventory and securing all these identities becomes unmanageable for organizations.

In a multi-cloud environment, an organization can grant 40,000 permissions to identities, of which more than 50% are high risks. This makes it difficult for organizations to identify who has access to what data and across which cloud platforms.

You can’t leverage the traditional identity and access management (IAM) approaches like static policy and role-based access control (RBAC) that cannot support increased entitlements and lack the capabilities to manage machine entitlements that are too granular and dynamic.

Cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM) helps organizations manage privileges at scale by automating access requests, assignments, reviews, and expirations. This guide examines the top 9 CIEM tools in 2025, highlighting key features and capabilities to help you choose the right solution. Discover which CIEM tool can best manage identity access, entitlement, and permissions within cloud infrastructure environments for human and workload entities.

What is the Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)?

80% of the workload identities are inactive, while less than 5% of the permissions granted are used. Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) helps enterprises manage cloud access risks by using analytics, machine learning (ML), and other methods to identify discrepancies and anomalies in account entitlements, such as disproportionate accumulations of privileges and dormant permissions. It provides security teams visibility into misconfigured permissions, enabling them to manage the security of their cloud infrastructure effectively.

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) capabilities, originally available only as point CIEM solutions, are now available as optional modules in integrated cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP) and are increasingly embedded in cloud security posture management (CSPM).

Need for CIEM Tools

CIEM tools enable organizations to manage user identities, permissions, and privileges across cloud environments. They help organizations automate user permissions, enforce the principle of least privilege, and optimize entitlements to cloud infrastructure and resources.

The tools enable organizations to reduce their cloud attack surface and mitigate access risks due to excessive permissions.

Let’s take a look at the specific gaps it fills for teams managing complex cloud systems today.

The Problem of Invisible Permissions – How Much Do We Actually Know?

Right now, how many dormant accounts in your organization have privileges beyond their actual use?

The reality is that privileged accounts, granted permissions over time, become ticking time bombs. CIEM tools do something extraordinary here. They monitor and audit every permission in real time, surfacing “invisible” access points that often get missed. The result? A level of visibility that’s rarely possible otherwise.

Human Error in Permissions Management: Who is Watching the “Almost Trusted”?

Permissions management is messy. Between granting, modifying, and revoking permissions, things slip through the cracks. And while everyone talks about zero trust, the reality is that many employees hold “almost trusted” permissions.

CIEM goes beyond monitoring privileged access; it spots patterns in these smaller, everyday permissions too. That means it can detect when someone accidentally grants more access than necessary.

Multi-Cloud Permissions: How Many Policies Can One Team Manage?

Managing permissions for one cloud is complex enough. Multiply that across clouds, and it’s a full-time job (or several). CIEM offers a lifeline here, creating a unified view across multi-cloud environments. It allows teams to enforce one consistent policy no matter where your data or apps live.

Automation with Precise Access Controls

Here’s something a few teams talk about non-human identities. Bots, scripts, and even AI models have permissions too, and not managing them carefully is risky. CIEM allows granular, role-based controls for these non-human actors. It can track their activity and automatically scale back access that’s too broad, enforcing the least privilege across the board.

Regulatory Compliance as a Continuous Process

CIEM tools audit logs of executed cloud commands and correlate them with entitlements such as roles, users, etc. If misconfigurations are detected, CIEM security policies are triggered, which is then reflected in the compliance dashboard, indicating the overall security posture of the cloud environment.

CIEM tools help detect and remediate policy drift, which can then be leveraged to automate compliances.

CIEM solutions are thus essential to ensure business continuity, reduce costs, and improve productivity and innovations. They reduce organizational efforts in managing entitlements and misconfiguration risks of identities in multiple clouds.

CIEM Tools Landscape in 2025

#1. SentinelOne Singularity Cloud

SentinelOne is an advanced AI-driven autonomous cyber security platform that provides a holistic view of the organization’s cloud infrastructure. This AI-powered singularity platform provides robust security across endpoints, identities, and cloud workloads.

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a feature in the Singularity Cloud Native Security module. The Singularity Cloud CIEM tool helps detect risky and overprivileged human and machine identities, identify toxic permission combinations, and mitigate risks from privilege escalation. It enables security teams to deploy pre-built, advanced detections created by SentinelOne’s research team.

Platform at a Glance

SentinelOne’s Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) solution provides a comprehensive approach to managing and monitoring user identities and permissions across intricate cloud environments.

Unlike standard tools like IAM or PAM that handle general access management, SentinelOne’s CIEM solution hones in on the unique demands of cloud security, tightening up access controls and making entitlements work smarter.

SentinelOne’s CIEM tools come packed with features like access discovery, user authentication, governance, and enforcing least-privilege access all the essentials to keep unauthorized access and credential risks in check. This platform brings enhanced, cloud-native security designed especially for AWS environments, powered by AI to safeguard cloud infrastructure from code to endpoint.

Check out the demo tour and walkthrough for SentinelOne

Features:

• SentinelOne Graph Explorer enables you to visualize relationships across cloud assets, resources, and business services.
• It allows customers to write custom policies for detecting misconfigurations and vulnerabilities.
• It enables your organization to enforce the least privilege to right-size entitlements to reduce the risk of attacks.
• The tool automatically remediates cloud workload misconfigurations, prevents lateral movement, and minimizes attack surfaces.
• It uses advanced analytical technologies to monitor real-time behavior anomalies, potential threats, and security incidents.
• It manages all human & machine identities through a single pane of glass.

Core Problems that SentinelOne Eliminates

• Identify and flag misconfigured cloud assets with more than 2,000 built-in checks. Get support for major cloud service providers, including AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, DigitalOcean, and Alibaba Cloud.
• Eliminates misconfigurations by efficiently fixing configuration drifts.
• It includes 1000+ out-of-the-box rules enabling organizations to create custom rules.
• The real-time alert system updates organizations on possible threats or vulnerabilities, enabling them to respond to, contain, and remediate threats.
• Detailed logging and reporting help organizations maintain compliance with regulatory standards and easily assess compliance issues.
• IaC scanning, AI-SIEM, agentless vulnerability management, and 1-click threat remediation
• Unique Offensive Security Engine prevents lateral attacks and escalations and maps out potential adversarial paths for swift and early resolutions.
• World-class threat intelligence and threat-hunting capabilities for multi-cloud environments cover complete protection for all applications, workloads, and data.
• Provides full forensic telemetry and prevents secret leakage for over 750+ different types of secrets.

Testimonial

According to Raymond Schippers, Head of Threat Detection and Response at Canva:

“The three words best describe SentioneOne are reliability, performance, and scalability. SentinelOne’s attack chain coverage has helped us to identify external threats and internal compliance issues.  It has enhanced visibility across our cloud infrastructure, helping us identify human and machine identities that do not comply with the rules. The platform seamlessly integrates with Windows, Mac and Linux environments, enhancing our threat detection and responsiveness capabilities.”

Look at Singularity™ Cloud Security’s ratings and reviews on Gartner Peer Insights and PeerSpot for additional insights

#2. SailPoint

SailPoint Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management is not an add-on tool but is integrated into the SailPoint platform and is available through a tab on the SailPoint dashboard. The tool visibility includes insight into over-permissioned identities to enforce the principle of least privilege for users, roles, groups and resources. It can identify excess privileges and right-size access by finding unused and sensitive entitlements from your organization’s multi-cloud environment.

Features:

• Provides an identify-centric view of cloud access and usage
• It provides visualization of access from the identity to cloud resources, enabling you to view the access path from a single entitlement or all access paths from all entitlements.
• The tool models and defines consistent access policies based on roles and activities across multiple IaaS platforms.
• Access to identity security cloud reporting tools and CIEM built-in reports
• Tool seamlessly integrates with different PAM providers such as Okta, AWS IAM, and others.
• Supports proprietary entitlement and identity protocols of the three main CSP(Cloud Service Providers), Amazon, Google and Microsoft

Find out what users are saying about Salepoint CIEM’s practical benefits on PeerSpot reviews.

#3. Delinea

Delinea introduced Privilege Control for Cloud Entitlements into its cloud-native, unified identity security platform along with Delinea Identity Threat Protection with the acquisition of  Authomize in January 2024. It enables organizations to adopt an intelligent, risk-based approach to cloud access management and identity threats. Delinea Privilege Control for Cloud Entitlements provides deep context into cloud and identity usage to discover excess privilege and limit authorization across multi-cloud infrastructure to minimize risk.

Features:

• It helps with the continuous discovery of entitlements across public clouds and identity providers in constantly changing, complex cloud environments that enable organizations to right-size entitlements to limit risk but enable productivity.
• Organizations gain visibility of all identities and their access pathways across the public multi-cloud infrastructure to enable you to find misconfigurations and normalize privileged behavior across the cloud.
• It enables your organization to enforce the least privilege to right-size entitlements without sacrificing productivity.
• Create customized access monitoring policies.
• It allows humans and machines to seamlessly authenticate, enforcing least privilege with just-in-time privilege elevation, increasing accountability, and reducing administrative access risk.

Look at Delinea review scores on Gartner and SourceForge to see if it meets your needs.

#4. Saviynt

Saviynt offers organizations visibility and control over both human and machine identities enhancing their overall security including infrastructure and applications. The platform helps them streamline business processes, providing all stakeholders with timely access to digital resources. It offers CIEM capabilities through an integrated IGA (Identity Governance and Administration) tool. It helps you identify compromised identities and abnormal access patterns with intelligence that transforms your security speed and effectiveness. It helps you reduce risk with advanced identity governance and intelligence.

Features:

• It manages all human & machine identities through a single control plane.
• It helps organizations achieve  zero standing privilege by granting just-in-time access for all identities and not just privileged users and achieve
• It tracks access decisions by automatically approving low-risk access enabling security teams to reduce decision time by 70%

Read up on Savyint on PeerSpot and SourceForge for honest user insights.

#5. Sonrai Security

Sonrai Security CIEM solution inventories all human and machine identities and computes their effective permissions to reveal over-privileged status, toxic combinations, and privilege escalation potential. It offers automated or prescriptive remediation that swiftly breaks down these identity risks to shut down attack paths to data. The company pioneered the Cloud Permissions Firewall, enabling one-click least privilege.

Features:

• In one click the cloud permission firewall removes all unused sensitive permissions, and quarantines unused identities while disabling unused services and regions enabling the security team to reduce the attack surface by 92%.
• The tool handles new access needs quickly with an automated request workflow integrated into organization-preferred ChatOps tools.
• Sonrai’s patented analytics in the CIEM+ solution identify problematic chains created by toxic combinations of permissions.

Discover what actual users think of Sonrai Security on PeerSpot.

#6. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Prisma Cloud CIEM provides users with broad visibility into effective permissions. It continuously monitors multi-cloud environments for risky and unused entitlements and automatically makes least privilege recommendations. The tool provides users with valuable insights about the identities that have access to critical infrastructure, including those associated with an IDP provider. The tool’s key features include net-effective permissions, rightsizing permissions, IAM entitlement investigation, IDP integration, and automated remediation.

Features:

• The tool calculates users’ effective permissions across cloud service providers detects excessive and unused privileges and offers recommendations to rightsize them to achieve least-privileged access
• It leverages out-of-the-box policies to detect risky permissions and automatically remediates overly permissive roles
• It can query all relevant IAM entities including relationships among different entities and their effective permissions across cloud environments
• Queries can be turned into custom cloud-agnostic policies and define remediation steps along with compliance implications
• It integrates with  identity provider (IdP) services and AWS IAM identify
• It sends alert notifications to 14 third-party tools, including email, AWS Lambda & Security Hub, and automatically adjusts permissions to continuously enforce least-privileged access

Assess Prisma Cloud’s credibility by looking at its reviews and ratings on PeerSpot and Gartner Peer Insights.

#7. Tenable CIEM

Tenable acquired the CIEM tool Ermetic in 2023 and rebranded it as Tenable CIEM. The tool is now part of a unified Tenable CNAPP solution. It helps organizations enforce least privilege policies, prevent data breaches, and maintain compliance in a multi-cloud environment. The CIEM tool can expose a full asset inventory across regions, accounts, and divisions for AWS/Azure/GCP. It provides granular visibility into all identities, configurations, permissions, and activities.

Features:

• Provides visibility into all identities (IAM, federated, 3rd party), entitlements, resources & configurations in your multi-cloud environment
• Enforce the least privilege using built-in and custom templates.
• Automates compliance audit and reporting
• Dashboards help organizations govern access policy and compliance from one place, including tracking key metrics.
• Identify riskiest permissions and misconfigurations across identity, network, compute, and data resources
• Provides advanced threat analysis and prioritization capabilities to detect the latest threats and zero-day vulnerabilities
• Visualize and prioritize at-risk identities and resources across human and service identities, network configuration, data, secrets, and compute resources.

Read through reviews on PeerSpot and SourceForge to form an educated opinion on Tenable’s CIEM capabilities.

#8. ObserveID

The agentless cloud native CIEM tool tracks cloud identities, roles, and entitlements across multiple platforms, ensuring compliance with regulations and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks. The tool enables you to discover the full range of entitlements for all identity types and offers automation of various functions. It integrates support for custom policy management, and you can customize policies through the dashboard. The platform is provided in two formats: one for enterprises with existing IGA/IAM/PAM solutions and another for organizations looking for a CIEM solution with lightweight PAM and IGA functionality.

Features:

• Provides granular context-rich visibility into all identities, configurations, access policies, entitlements, permissions, and activities
• The agentless solution scans the organization’s unmanaged identities and another telemetry across the multi-cloud environments to identify exposed keys, passwords in shell history, and other vulnerabilities that an attacker can exploit to gain lateral entry into your cloud environment
• Discovers remote access keys such as cloud service provider keys, SSH keys, and more, to prevent attackers from accessing your organizational additional sensitive resources
• Send alerts on detecting any unauthorized user activities such as compromised accounts and stolen access keys
• Recommend transformational security improvements by comparing existing CIEM policies to actual policy usage from the previous 180-day
• Enable your security team to implement custom remediation actions based on your organization’s security policies for an alert, on-demand, or automated remediation

#9. Check Point CloudGuard CIEM

Check Point CloudGuard CIEM enables you to identify, detect, prioritize, and remediate cloud access management risks. The tool establishes the effective policy of any asset by analyzing the permissions to that entity. You can easily visualize these policies on an entitlement map and monitor account activity to identify over-privileged entities that can pose security risks. You can ensure the least privileged access across users and cloud services by right-sizing over permissive entitlements.

Features:

• CloudGuard CIEM tool allows you to visualize effective permissions of users and cloud services.
• It can help you detect unused roles, over-permissions, and risky entitlements.
• The tool automatically generates the least privileged roles based on actual usage.
• The tool helps you identify abandoned or lost users who may be exploited by threat actors to breach your cloud security.
• The tool seamlessly integrates with leading IAM (Identity and Access Management) vendors to ensure access is only granted to authorized users.

Evaluate these PeerSpot and G2 reviews to get an informed opinion about Check Point CloudGuard’s CIEM features.

How to Choose the Right CIEM Tools?

Most cloud-native application risk is caused by misconfiguration, mismanagement, or excessive permissions. You can deploy CIEM capabilities as a point solution or adapt the module from an integrated CNAPP solution. When evaluating a provider, you must evaluate many characteristics and features to select an ideal CIEM tool.

Selecting a top CIEM tool for your organization requires comprehensive evaluation criteria, with some critical ones listed below. 

• Entitlements Protection & Optimization – The CIEM tool must be able to detect changes within any managed cloud infrastructure environment. Your tool must also leverage the usage data generated by privileges operations across cloud infrastructure in combination with entitlement data to determine the least privilege entitlement. Sentinel One Singularity Cloud adjusts permissions based on usage data to eliminate unnecessary access and reduce the surface of attack, which improves your overall security posture.

• Account and Entitlements Discovery – Your CIEM tool must be able to inventory all identities(human, machine, and non-people) and entitlements across your enterprise’s cloud infrastructure. It must also have functionalities for event-based discovery,  access policies analysis, and discovery of any federated and native cloud identities.

• Visibility and Monitoring – Your tool must offer granular visibility integrated with all cloud environments and entities across your IT infrastructure. You must evaluate features such as a dashboard and audit trail to enable you to track changes and detect anomalies. It must allow you to see every connection between identity and data.

• Automation – Your CIEM tool must enable you to automate routine tasks such as provisioning and de-provisioning user access based on predefined policies or role changes. It helps streamline access permissions management, improve efficiency, reduce errors, and ensure that permissions are updated consistently.

• Customizable & Flexible – Your tool must offer customization options to enable you to meet your unique cloud security configuration requirements. The tool must also be able to correlate identity management across multiple cloud platforms for a centralized view.

• Alerts – Your CIEM tool must be able to detect cloud infrastructure threats and respond to alert events by alerting the security team at the right time or remediating.

• Compliance support – It should offer continuous monitoring to ensure regular compliance checks.

• Reporting – Your CIEM tool must enable you to easily query data and identities to gain relevant insights into different aspects of your organization’s cloud security. You must be able to customize reports to your organization’s unique reporting requirements and create detailed reports to highlight compliance during audits and reviews.

• Integration – Your CIEM tool must seamlessly integrate with other systems in your tech stack, such as IAM and SIEM platforms.

In addition, your tool should be able to graph and visualize your real-time inventory and all entitlements because table-driven visualization becomes unfeasible as the magnitude and complexity of the cloud increase. Your tool should be intuitive and user-friendly, with detailed documentation to enable your team to implement the solution with minimum support and training. It should scale as your organization grows.

Conclusion

Most cloud-native application risk is caused by misconfiguration, mismanagement or excessive permissions. Even if you are not deploying an integrated CNAPP solution, you should deploy CIEM and CSPM(Cloud Security Management) capabilities. CIEM enables you to secure your cloud environment and the data. You can leverage identity inventory and their effective permissions (cloud entitlements) from a CIEM tool to determine what data identities can access, how they can access the data, and what they can potentially do with the data.

An ideal CIEM should inventory people and machine identities, determine their privileges and permissions, and be agile and flexible to accommodate different cloud environments. It must also help organizations keep pace with the rapid growth in identities, whether they are employees or non-person identities such as machines or roles.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is an integrated CNAPP solution (read our case studies to learn more) that includes a CIEM module with a user-friendly interface. It will help you efficiently manage user entitlements and privileges, contributing to the establishment of a secure and compliant cloud environment. Don’t wait for any misconfigurations leading to data breaches or security incidents; get ahead with your SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security to secure your cloud infrastructure and data assets. Book a demo to learn more.

FAQs

1. What is a CIEM tool?

CIEM tools automate user entitlement and privilege management for singular and multi-cloud environments. The tool analyzes existing entitlement inventories, users, and privileged tasks as they are performed to determine the least privilege required to perform an activity. It continuously scans to identify anomalies in entitlement usage across your multi-cloud environment and suggests ways to mitigate risks by optimizing permissions and privileges.

2. What are the components of CIEM?

CIEM primarily includes rules and policies governing identity management and cloud infrastructure access. Its core components are as follows.

• User entitlements: CIEM allocates users privileges and tracks the extent of their rights to access and control resources, tools, and services within a cloud.
• Security protocols: CIEM sets the highest level of workload access that a user is entitled to at any given time.

CIEM tools assess entitlement inventories to prioritize least privilege access and prevent misuse. The automated assessment continuously evaluates existing entitlements against security regulations for compliance.  CIEM would be incomplete without a dashboard that provides a unified view of your organization’s security policies, visible through a single pane of glass.

3. Benefits of CIEM?

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management offers a range of benefits that make cloud security easier and more effective. First off, it shows you exactly who has access to what across your cloud, helping to avoid accidental permissions and block any unauthorized access.

CIEM also uses “least privilege” rules, which means people only get access to what they actually need, nothing extra. CIEM tools also bring automation to compliance efforts, making it easier to meet regulatory standards without the usual manual work.

Plus, they continuously monitor and adapt to any changes in permissions or user behavior, so you’re always up-to-date with security best practices.

4. What is the difference between IAM and CIEM?

IAM (Identity and Access Management) and CIEM are identity security solutions but differ in scope and end-use. IAM is the foundational, enterprise-wide security framework for managing user identities and access to your organization’s IT infrastructure.. It enables you to govern access to all resources, including on-premise systems, cloud applications, hybrid environments, and services.It also helps you comply with regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, etc.

CIEM is a subset of IAM that focuses on providing organizations with greater visibility and control over access to cloud resources. It is a centralized approach to ensuring that organizations’ cloud access rights are appropriate and compliant.

5. What is the difference between CIEM and CIAM?

CIEM and CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) are specialized subsets of IAM.

CIAM focuses on managing users’ identities and experiences. It enables businesses to add user registration functions, identity management, and access controls for their customer-facing applications. CIAM also enables you to protect your customer data privacy and defend against data theft, fraud, and other identity misuse.

CIEM focuses on managing accesses and permissions within cloud infrastructure to ensure users and machines have appropriate privileges and entitlements. It helps you to prevent misconfigurations and excessive permissions.