Topic starter
25/06/2026 12:27 am
TL;DR: Cloud infrastructure entitlement management addresses the hidden problem of excessive and unused permissions across AWS, Azure, and GCP, where IAM alone does not provide enough visibility or control over human and machine access, according to SecurEnds. The real issue is not cloud growth itself, but the widening gap between granted access and what identity governance can actually prove.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by SecurEnds: “Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM): The Ultimate Guide for 2025”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when cloud teams rely on IAM alone?
A: Relying on IAM alone leaves teams blind to effective access and permission drift.
Q: Why do over-privileged cloud entitlements increase breach impact?
A: They increase breach impact because a stolen credential or compromised integration can inherit far more access than the underlying task requires.
Q: What are the signs that cloud entitlement management is failing in practice?
A: Common warning signs include unclear visibility into who and what can access cloud resources, excessive permissions that remain in place after they are needed, and inconsistent control across IaaS platforms.
Practitioner guidance
- Map every cloud identity to its effective entitlements Inventory users, workloads, service accounts, and machine identities across AWS, Azure, and GCP, then resolve inherited and direct permissions into one entitlement view.
- Prioritise the permissions that create toxic combinations Look for overlapping roles, dormant admin access, and unused privileges that combine into a wider blast radius than any single grant suggests.
- Separate automated cleanup from sensitive approvals Allow right-sizing and revocation for low-risk entitlements, but keep production-critical or ownership-unclear permissions in a review queue.
Bottom line: Cloud entitlement sprawl creates a governance gap that IAM alone cannot close because it does not prove whether effective permissions are still justified.
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This topic was modified 1 day ago by NHI Mgmt Group
25/06/2026 9:22 am
CIEM exists because cloud access has become analytically opaque, not because IAM failed at login control. The real gap is that modern cloud governance cannot easily prove whether permissions remain justified once they are inherited, duplicated, or left behind after a temporary need. That shifts the security problem from authentication to entitlement governance. Practitioners should treat entitlement visibility as a control requirement, not an audit convenience.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 96% of security operations teams report critical blind spots, most commonly in cloud infrastructure (74%) and identity and access behaviour (67%).
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should organisations combine CIEM with IAM and CSPM?
A: Use IAM to grant access, CSPM to assess configuration risk, and CIEM to verify whether the effective entitlements are still justified. The three controls solve different problems, so collapsing them into one process usually leaves a visibility gap. Cloud governance works best when each control owns its distinct layer.
👉 Read our full editorial: Cloud infrastructure entitlement management and the real cloud access gap
This post was modified 1 day ago by NHI Mgmt Group