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22/07/2026 4:35 pm
TL;DR: Cloud entitlement sprawl in AWS, Azure, and GCP turns effective permissions, privilege drift, and machine identity risk into a persistent access problem, according to Securden’s analysis. Visibility alone is not enough: cloud permissions have to be tied to enforcement, lifecycle control, and least privilege if teams want to reduce blast radius rather than just report on it.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Securden: Cloud entitlement management and unified identity security in multi-cloud environments
By the numbers:
- Only 44% of organisations have implemented any policies to manage their AI agents, despite 92% agreeing that governing AI agents is critical to enterprise security.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce unused cloud permissions without breaking workloads?
A: Start by identifying permissions that have not been used over a meaningful window, then quarantine them rather than deleting identities outright.
Q: Why do cloud identities create more risk than on-premises roles?
A: Cloud identities are dynamic, distributed, and policy-driven, so the real access path often comes from inheritance, trust relationships, and automation rather than a simple role assignment.
Q: What do security teams get wrong about CIEM programmes?
A: They often treat CIEM as a discovery layer instead of a governance layer.
Practitioner guidance
- Map effective permissions across all cloud accounts Build entitlement reviews around calculated effective permissions, not only the role assignments visible in each console.
- Link CIEM findings to a PAM control path Require every over-privilege alert to have a direct remediation path through vaulting, session control, approval, or JIT access.
- Prioritise privilege drift and toxic combinations Rank remediation by identities that have accumulated access over time and by permission pairs that can be chained into escalation.
What's in the full article
Securden's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step comparison of unified CIEM and PAM workflows across AWS, Azure, and GCP for practitioners ready to operationalise remediation.
- Feature-by-feature discussion of integrated JIT access, vaulting, and session recording for cloud privilege control.
- Vendor comparison context for teams evaluating alternative cloud entitlement tooling and integration overhead.
- Practical examples of how to move from permission discovery to enforced least privilege within one platform.
👉 Read Securden's analysis of unified cloud entitlement management →
Cloud entitlements and PAM integration: what IAM teams should do?
Explore further
22/07/2026 4:41 pm
Cloud entitlement management has become an enforcement problem, not a visibility problem. The industry has spent years building tools that can enumerate permissions, but enumeration does not reduce blast radius on its own. Once effective permissions span inherited roles, trust chains, and machine identities, the programme has to be able to act on what it finds. The practical conclusion is that CIEM belongs inside a control loop, not beside one.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 88.5% of organisations acknowledge that their non-human IAM practices lag behind or are merely on par with their human identity and access management efforts, according to the 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report.
- 59.8% of organisations see value in a solution that simplifies non-human access management and introduces dynamic ephemeral credentials, according to the same report.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own cloud entitlement risk when PAM and CIEM are both involved?
A: Ownership should sit with identity and cloud security together, because entitlement risk spans access design, operational enforcement, and ongoing review. IAM defines what should be allowed, PAM controls how elevated access is used, and cloud teams understand the workload context. If those functions are split without a shared workflow, privilege creep usually wins.
👉 Read our full editorial: Cloud entitlement management needs PAM-linked controls, not visibility alone
