CIEM vs. CSPM: What’s the Difference?

The rise in cloud computing uptake among organizations has necessitated stronger security protocols because vital operations are increasingly reliant on cloud infrastructure. Two key pillars, therefore, emerge for effectively securing cloud environments: Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). Among any organization’s leading cloud-security technology, each plays an integral part in protecting cloud environments, although serving different purposes and addressing distinct security preparations.

In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the core features of CIEM and CSPM, highlight key differences, and explain how these technologies can be harmonized to yield a more secure cloud environment. By the end of this article, you’ll clearly understand both solutions and be in a better position to make a decision related to your organization’s cloud security strategy.

What is CIEM?

CIEM, or Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management, is a security solution that monitors and controls access, rights/permissions across multiple cloud environments. CIEM’s area of interest is the risk associated with excessive, unused, or misallocated privileges in the cloud environment.

Key Features of CIEM

1. Identity and access management: CIEM helps in managing user identity, roles, and access control at the central place for all cloud platforms.
2. Privilege discovery & analysis: It helps organizations to discover, and assess any existing privileges for security threats.
3. Least privilege enforcement: CIEM supports the concept of least privilege, in that users hold essentially the least amount of access rights necessary in the execution of their tasks.
4. Real-time monitoring: Real-time monitoring of access patterns and user activities for detecting possible security threats through continuous monitoring of activities against anomalies that could represent security threats.
5. Automated Remediation: Automated revoked or adjusted permissions through CIEM, which is based on predefined policies and the identified risks.

What is Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)?

Cloud Security Posture Management includes cloud security tools and processes aimed at identifying and remediating risks across cloud infrastructures. These efforts ensure the proper configuration of cloud environments, adherence to best practices by cloud providers, and compliance with security standards and regulatory requirements.

Key Features of CSPM

• Monitoring for compliance: Continuous assessment of cloud configurations against industry standards and regulatory frameworks, using tools to maintain general industry compliance.
• Misconfiguration detection: This component will detect and certainly generate misconfiguration alerts relative to security vulnerabilities or violations in your system’s compliance.
• Asset inventory and visibility: CSPM provides a centralized view of all cloud assets and their current security state.
• Risk assessment and risk prioritization: The tool thus helps organizations rate and prioritize security risks using the basis of their likelihood and possible effect.
• Automated remediation: CSPM can perform automatic remediation for certain misconfigurations or a provision of guided remediation steps.

6 Critical Differences Between CIEM vs CSPM

1. Focus

CIEM mainly deals with identities and access rights in the cloud. Its main focus is on who can use which resources and guaranteeing that these rights are correct and safe. CSPM focuses on the security of the cloud environment’s infrastructure. It focuses on how cloud resources are set up and whether or not they meet security and compliance standards.

2. Key functions

In CIEM, key functions include user access management & governance, as well as identity privileges. This includes but is not restricted to the following:

• Identification and maintenance of user roles and permissions
• Detection plus reduction of excessive privileges.
• Access pattern monitoring and analysis.
• Enforcement of least privilege concepts.

Key functions in CSPM are aimed at enhancing infrastructure security and compliance. Among its main tasks are:

• Checking cloud configurations against security baselines;
• Detecting misconfigurations, raising alerts
• Enforcing compliance with regulatory standards
• Providing an overview of the overall security posture of the resources present within a given cloud environment.

3. Primary goal

CIEM reduces the risk of unauthorized access and insider threats by ensuring that users have just enough permission to perform their jobs. The system prevents privilege escalation and minimizes the impact of compromised accounts.

The primary goal of CSPM is to support a secure and compliant cloud infrastructure by detecting misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, compliance gaps, etc. This further aims to reduce the attack surface area and ensure adherence to security best practices when setting up cloud resources.

4. Scope of Coverage

CIEM mainly covers:

• End user and service accounts
• Roles and permissions
• Access Policies
• Identity providers
• Cross-account access

CSPM generally covers:

• Network configurations
• Storage settings
• Compute instances
• Database configurations
• Security groups and firewalls
• Mitigation approach to risk

Risk mitigation approach adopted by CIEM includes the following:

• Application of least privileges methodology
• Continuous monitoring with adaptive access control
• Excessive permission detection with remediation
• Anomalous user behavior analysis

Risk mitigation by CSPM includes

• Automating the validation of security provisions
• Maintaining compliance with required security standards in place
• Making visible the general position of security

5. Data protection focus

CIEM is centered on data protection by defining the access rights to the data and the permitted operations on the same. It makes sure that only the users with the right level of clearance can access the sensitive information.

CSPM safeguards data by guaranteeing that the environment holding the data is secured. It deals with the problems such as storage buckets, encryption configurations, and access logging.

6. Compliance Issues

CIEM helps in:

• Separation of duties enforcement
• Audit trails for access activities
• Sensitive data appropriate access controls assurance
• Identity-related compliance support

CSPM also helps in compliance through;

• Regulatory standards configuration assessment
• Compliance reports and dashboard provisioning
• Automating compliance checks and remediation deployment.
• Infrastructure-level compliance control maintenance

CIEM vs CSPM: Key Differences

Use cases of CIEM and CSPM

CIEM and CSPM are the two major tools for upgrading visibility and control over cloud security. Each has unique advantages for varying industries and use cases.

CIEM Use Cases:

1. Managing multi-cloud access – Big enterprises face complex multi-cloud situations with multiple users and services. Netflix, for instance, uses CIEM to manage its permissions over its AWS infrastructure, ensuring the appropriate rights to the development teams with appropriate permissions and a focus on security.
2. Zero trust deployment – Financial institutions reportedly prioritize zero-trust architecture in their cloud environments. They also use CIEM to make their cloud infrastructure security match the “never trust, always verify” concept.
3. Mitigating insider threats – Healthcare providers should reduce the risks that could arise from insider threats and abuse of privileges. They use CIEM, for example, to trace access to patient data within cloud domains.
4. Automated access reviews – The fast-growing corporations need automatic review for information access. A relevant example could well be of the companies in the hospitality sector as perhaps it would ease access management procedures more with the growth of CIEM.
5. Identity and compliance assurance – Compliance with identity and access management regulations is an imperative need for businesses. For example, General Electric (GE) uses CIEM to remain compliant with various pertinent international data protection laws across its business units.

CSPM Use Cases:

1. Multi-cloud security consistency – The solution ensures consistent security practices across various cloud providers—a capability that is crucial for multinational companies. Using CSPM, the firms can apply various types of security policies and configurations consistently to their AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud environments.
2. Automated security compliance – Security checks and compliance assessments are necessary, especially in a high-risk industry like e-commerce. CSPM helps companies in this sector scan their cloud infrastructure for possible vulnerabilities and compliance issues regularly.
3. Proactive misconfiguration prevention – Companies that provide financial services need to discover misconfigurations and repair them before they cause breaches. Most fintech companies use CSPM to find misconfigurations throughout the cloud environment and set up a toll for automatic remediation.
4. Cloud security posture visibility  – This allows enterprises to appreciate the level of security present in their cloud services in general and establishes confidence in using another alternative within the same platform. Some organizations utilize the role of CSPM for better visibility of their current status in terms of cloud security.
5. Continuous regulatory compliance – Healthcare companies need to have the back-end capability to maintain compliance with industry standards and regulations. As a result, businesses employ CSPM to guarantee that the cloud environment matches up with HIPAA and other exclusive healthcare standards.

Combining CIEM and CSPM for Improved Security in the Cloud

CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management) and CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) are different solutions, but they complement each other in a company’s cloud security strategy. Thus, instead of separately providing these solutions, organizations can adopt a more integrated approach to addressing the security of their cloud environments.

1. A holistic view of security: CSPM vs CIEM integration is effective as it covers identity-related threats and configuration issues in cloud infrastructure security.
2. Increased risk identification: In this way, the relationship between changes made in the internal structure of an infrastructure and the activities related to integrity may unmask compound attack patterns.
3. Boosted compliance monitoring: Therefore, an Identity Infrastructure Compliance solution could be packed into one box so that audits & reporting becomes less complicated.
4. Improved incident response: It helps the security team stop threats when both identities and configurations are present together.
5. Cost-Effective Security: Since both CIEM and CSPM serve similar roles, it would be more cost-effective to implement one platform that includes both.

SentinelOne consolidates CIEM and CSPM for a more secure cloud environment

SentinelOne can improve your cloud security posture and ingest all security and IT data from any source or store, for as long as you need, for data analysis. It is one of the world’s leading AI-driven cybersecurity platforms that can centralize and transform security data to produce actionable threat intelligence. SentinelOne comes with a Singularity Data Lake to provide flexible enterprise and IT security operations along with AI-assisted monitoring, investigation, and response capabilities.

It is a multi-cloudSentinelOne that has a cloud security solution that involves both CIEM and CSPM functionalities. By leveraging SentinelOne’s platform, organizations can benefit in the following ways:

• Single pane of glass visibility for all cloud identities, endpoints, networks, cloud identity, and infrastructure.
• Machine learning-based threat detection, permissions, and configuration management, that links information about identity and configuration, plus malware analysis.
• Uncovers hidden cloud assets, deployments, and enables policy enforcement.
• Enforces least privilege access principle and data access restrictions.
• Prevent data duplication and augment SIEM.
• Automated remediation for access risks as well as misconfigurations
• Easier compliance management that addresses issues to do with identity and infrastructure.
• Compatibility with other security products and procedures.

Conclusion

CIEM is a major instrument in security management and assessing risk for cloud services is performed by CSPM. Concentrations on CIEM mainly involve identity administration and access rights. On the other hand, CSPM takes a wider view and involves the overall security of cloud infrastructure. In most cases, organizations must have integration of both CIEM and CSPM for seamless cloud security management.

To determine which solution should be the focus of your efforts, consider your organization’s requirements, cloud structure, and main risks. If identity and access management are your main pain points, CIEM might be the better starting point. If misconfigurations and compliance are more important than security issues, then CSPM might be the focus.

In conclusion, it is crucial to apply CIEM and CSPM at the same time, either as individual tools or as a single platform, such as SentinelOne. This approach covers both cloud identity and the infrastructure, making it possible for the cloud to be secure, conform to the set legal requirements, and be efficient for business.

CIEM vs CSPM FAQs

1. What are CSPM and CIEM?

CSPM (Cloud Security Posture Management) is a set of tools and processes that allow to detect and mitigate security risks related to settings in the cloud infrastructure. CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management) deals with identities and entitlements of the cloud environments.

2. Can I use CIEM and CSPM at the same time?

Yes, CIEM and CSPM can be used in parallel, and it is recommended to use both to achieve an effective approach to cloud security. It is important to note that both of them are related to the cloud security aspect but serve different purposes in order to enhance the security of the cloud environment.

3. Which are the top CSPM and CIEM Tools?

Some popular CSPM and CIEM tools include:

• SentinelOne (offering both CSPM and CIEM capabilities)
• Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks
• CloudKnox Security
• Zscaler Cloud Protection
• Check Point CloudGuard
• Ermetic
• Sonrai Security

4. What is the difference between CIEM and CASB?

CIEM is more focused on the identities and the access rights in the cloud environment while CASB is a security policy enforcement point between cloud consumers and providers that track and regulate the access to the cloud applications.

5. What is the difference between CSPM and SIEM?

CSPM is used for the detection of misconfiguration and compliance issues in cloud infrastructure security, while SIEM is a collection and analysis of log data from various sources to identify security events in an organization’s IT infrastructure.

6. What is the difference between IAM and CIEM?

IAM is a more encompassing concept that deals with the management of identity and access privileges within an organization’s IT ecosystem. CIEM is a specialized sub-set of IAM that is majorly concerned with entitlements and access rights on cloud structures.