CIEM Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management
Discovers and right-sizes the cloud roles and permissions assigned to identities. The most over-permissioned identity is usually the one that gets compromised.
A cloud estate accumulates identities far faster than anyone tracks: human users, service accounts, roles, federated principals and workload identities, each carrying permissions granted at some point for some reason. Those grants are almost never revisited, because removing a permission risks breaking something while leaving it costs nothing visible. Entitlements therefore drift in one direction only, toward more access.
CIEM addresses that drift. It inventories every identity across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, resolves what each one can effectively do once policies, roles and inheritance are combined, compares that against what it has actually used, and recommends a smaller permission set. The effective-permission calculation is the hard part, because nested roles and inherited policies routinely grant far more than any single document suggests.
The security case is simply that over-permissioned identities convert a small compromise into a large one. A stolen credential is worth exactly what it can reach, so an unused administrative grant on a dormant service account is a breach multiplier sitting idle. Right-sizing entitlements shrinks the blast radius of every future credential theft at once.
Common questions
What does CIEM stand for?
CIEM stands for Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management. It refers to tooling and practice for discovering cloud identities, calculating what each can actually do, and reducing those permissions to what is genuinely needed.
What is the difference between CIEM and CSPM?
CSPM looks at how cloud resources are configured, finding things like a storage bucket open to the internet or logging switched off. CIEM looks at who can do what to those resources. They overlap at the edges and are often sold together, but a perfectly configured resource is still exposed if hundreds of identities hold standing administrative rights over it.
Is CIEM the same as IAM?
No. IAM is the cloud provider mechanism that grants and enforces access. CIEM is the discipline of auditing what those grants add up to across accounts and providers, spotting excess, and reducing it. IAM creates entitlements; CIEM keeps them honest over time.
CIEM is one signal.
We watch the rest.
Vijilan runs a 24/7 SOC across endpoint, identity, cloud, network, SaaS and mobile, and acts on what it finds rather than forwarding an alert.