Reviewed and updated in October 2026.
Corporate services used to run on premises, behind well-guarded walls. With mobile devices and the need to reach every service from anywhere on any device, organizations have moved more and more services to cloud providers to optimize cost and availability. Many now use several providers at once, such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, and managing identities and permissions across independent systems quickly becomes complex enough to create real security risks.
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) is a category of identity-centric security tools that discover, analyze and right-size the permissions that people, applications and services hold across one or more cloud platforms, from a single console. Its purpose is least privilege at cloud scale: finding permissions that are granted but not needed, removing them, and detecting suspicious use of the ones that remain.
The gap between granted and used permissions is large. According to Microsoft's 2023 State of Cloud Permissions Risks report, identities across Azure, AWS and Google Cloud used only 1% of the permissions granted to them, out of more than 40,000 possible permissions, more than half of which Microsoft classed as high-risk. Every unused permission is one an attacker or a malicious insider can exploit. A central solution that shows who has access to what, with which permissions, is therefore essential to stay in control.
The first key feature is permission discovery: a high-level overview of the actions any identity can perform across all the cloud providers an organization uses. A permission risk assessment then shows which permissions are used and how often, and reveals the gap between granted and used permissions so it can be closed, for example by lowering a privilege or removing it entirely when it is unused or the employee has left.
CIEM lets you grant permissions consistently across all cloud providers by mapping each provider's predefined roles and permissions to a single set defined by your organization. It can also grant privileges on demand through a defined workflow: a request for higher privileges is submitted, reviewed and approved if justified. Just-in-time access for a limited period minimizes standing privileges that attackers or malicious insiders could exploit.
Finally, permission monitoring detects and reports anomalous or suspicious activity, often with the help of machine learning, for example a user who suddenly receives an unusual privilege elevation.
First, the difference between Zero Trust and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). Zero Trust is a security model, often summarized as "never trust, always verify", in which every user, device and request is treated as potentially malicious until verified; our article Demystifying Security: Zero Trust explains it in detail. ZTNA is a specific product category within a Zero Trust architecture that provides secure, monitored and segmented access to corporate applications, on premises or in the cloud.
All three aim to control access, protect entry points and reduce risk by removing implicit trust, but each focuses on a different part of the problem:
Which one matters most depends on your environment and its specific challenges, but they complement rather than replace each other. Many vendors now ship CIEM as part of a broader cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) or an identity security platform.
CIEM helps grant IT staff the right level of permissions based on the Zero Trust principle of least privilege. It automates access granting and keeps permissions across cloud infrastructures consistent with roles such as help desk (L1), system administrator (L2) or system owner (L3).
When IT staff temporarily need higher privileges for a specific task, the permission is granted on demand, after approval, for that one task, and then reverts. For example, an urgent maintenance task comes up out of hours and the colleague with higher privileges is not on call, but can approve the request from a phone so that another colleague can do the work.
CIEM also helps with liability, especially in heavily regulated sectors: automated auditing produces detailed reports on the controls in place, including those relevant to data protection.
Microsoft's CIEM product, Microsoft Entra Permissions Management, which came from the 2021 acquisition of CloudKnox, is no longer available. Microsoft ended sales on April 1, 2025 and retired the product on November 1, 2025, and pointed existing customers to alternative CIEM solutions. The CIEM capabilities described here remain available from other vendors.
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management is a category of tools that discover, analyze and right-size permissions across cloud platforms, so identities hold only the access they actually need.
IAM authenticates users and assigns access. CIEM analyzes the resulting permissions in cloud infrastructure, finds excessive or unused ones and monitors how they are used.
No. ZTNA controls which applications a user and device may reach. CIEM controls what an identity may do inside the cloud platform. They address different layers.
No. Microsoft retired it on November 1, 2025. Organizations that used it need another CIEM solution.
Planning least-privilege access across your cloud and endpoint environment? ISEC7 advises on endpoint security and on Microsoft 365 and Azure environments as part of endpoint management, and can help you assess your options. Contact us.