CIEM vs CSPM: Which is the better solution for the Cloud?

The transition to the public cloud infrastructure has benefited organizations in many ways and allowed them to gain tremendous flexibility and scalability. Moreover, the shift towards the cloud has also made it easier for organizations to develop and manage applications. 

However, the transition to the public cloud infrastructure has also brought many security challenges, especially due to misconfiguration and excessive permissions. However, securing access and deploying security controls can be challenging, especially for organizations using multiple cloud environments. 

Fortunately, cloud security solutions like Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM have come to the rescue. However, as a user, it can be challenging to choose between the two. 

But worry not, a quick go-through of this article will give a detailed comparison of CIEM vs CSPMl. Through this blog, we will also discuss the following topics to help you make the right choice: 

1. What is CIEM and CSPM?
2. Benefits and Limitations associated with CIEM and CSPM.
3. How does CIEM and CSPM work?
4. A detailed difference between CIEM and CSPM.
5. CIEM vs CSPM: which solution will be better for your organization?

Now, let’s dive right in! 

What is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management?

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management, or CIEM, is a widely popular cybersecurity solution for managing access and permission to cloud infrastructure and services. It allows an organization to implement automated entitlement management processes across multi-cloud environments and helps them maintain robust access control throughout. 

CIEM implements the Principle of Least Privilege and Zero Trust security model to ensure users, systems, and applications only receive the minimal amount of access needed to function. Identity-related breaches have been major contributors to security incidents in recent times, as overprivileged permissions allow attackers to get full access to the cloud.

CIEM solves these issues by identifying access entitlement across the cloud and identity and mitigates risk origination from overprivileged accounts. With CIEM, the organization gets a centralized view of all the privileges, permissions, and entitlements and helps to get control over access to all the resources. 

How Does CIEM Work?

CIEM serves as an automated cybersecurity solution that continuously looks for the user’s entitlement to resources and discovers overused or inactive privileges. The main goal of CIEM is to mitigate all the risk that comes intentionally or unintentionally from inactive or over-permissive identities to cloud resources. 

This security solution works by leveraging AI and ML to automate the monitoring, identification, and remediation of issues. The first essential thing that every CIEM tool performs is to identify all the over-permissive and inactive privileges in the multi-cloud environment. 

Once it discovers all the access privileges, it looks for malicious activity that deviates from the security policy and provides an effective remediation process to reduce or eliminate access privileges. It also implements POLP, which rightsize the access privilege according to your requirements. CIEM also limits the user’s access to specific resources in a predefined time frame.

Benefits of CIEM

An effective CIEM solution offers you loads of benefits that ultimately fortify the security of cloud identity services and cloud infrastructure in the public environment. Let’s dive into the benefits of CIEM: 

Complete Visibility

By implementing the CIEM solution, you will get a centralized view of all the entitlements and permissions across multiple cloud environments. 

The visibility from a single window allows security teams to monitor activities, assess risks, and implement mitigation processes. It also allows security teams to monitor the level of access of users and systems to resources across clouds, entities, and services.  

DevOps Achieve Speed and Agility

DevOps teams face a huge difficulty when it comes to maintaining the least privileged access for all the resources as they have to maintain it manually. This not only reduces the agility of the DevOps but also decreases the speed. 

However, the CIEM tool, through auto-remediation, curbs excessive permission in an application and enables DevOps to accelerate the development process.

Better Identity and Access Management

A considerable benefit of CIEM is that it improves identity and access management in an organization by a large margin. It continuously monitors access activity across the cloud environment to discover and remediate outdated identities. Inactive identities pose a massive threat to an organization, but CIEM, through automated discovery, helps them solve it.

Continuous Detection and Remediation

CIEM, through automation, can detect insider threats, account compromise, stolen keys, and other malicious activities and remediate them. CIEM evaluates the baseline activity and, depending upon that provides reports regarding activities that deviate from the usual path.

Enhanced Security Posture

When you implement a CIEM solution, it works towards minimizing not only the risk associated with the public cloud but also the attack surface. 

It maintains an inventory of all the entitlements in your organization and continuously monitors them to remediate any issue associated with them automatically. It automatically identifies high-priority matters and provides the team with the best remediation plan to fix them effectively.

Limitations of CIEM

Even though CIEM serves as a highly effective security solution, it, too, has some limitations. Let’s explore all of them: 

Difficulty in Maintaining Visibility Due to Varied Security Standards

One of the critical issues associated with CIEM is the difficulty in maintaining visibility in the multi-cloud infrastructure due to different security standards and governance requirements. Every cloud platform has its own IAM strategies, and this creates a disparity in maintaining uniform access control to all the resources.

Dynamic Multi-Cloud Environment

Another significant issue associated with CIEM is the dynamic nature of the multi-cloud environment. In a dynamic cloud environment, resources are modified and de-provisioned rapidly, and these cause a huge challenge to CIEM in keeping up with entitlement adjustment. 

Inability to Prevent Misuse from Privileged Accounts

CIEM solution can effectively rightsize entitlements of accounts depending upon their access level and prevent malicious activity. However, it can prevent malicious activities from arising from privileged accounts. 

Lacks Holistic Designs

Despite CIEM being a popular security solution, it is still yet to mature as a technology and requires a holistic design. It is designed to address only issues arising due to over-permissive and unused privileges. 

Difficulty in Implementation

CIEM is designed to serve complex and multi-cloud environments, and implementation of such solutions can be difficult for many. Without the right expertise and support, you might have to go through a lot of hassle. Moreover, the investment for implementation of this solution is also high, and the team has to go through a learning curve to effectively use it.

What is Cloud Security Posture Management?

Cloud Security Posture Management, or CSPM, is a security solution and practice designed to help organizations identify and prevent misconfigurations, compliance risks, and other threats that can lead to security breaches. 

It continuously monitors your entire cloud infrastructure, especially the security configuration, and discovers potential misconfigurations and compliance risks. This security tool helps the team by automating the monitoring, visibility, and remediation process for the Infrastructure as a service(IaaS), Software as a service SaaS) and Platform as a services(PaaS). 

It also assesses the whole cloud environment by comparing it against known security risks, compliance standards, and a list of best security practices. Most of the organizations that shift to cloud providers opt for CSPM because it provides instant reports regarding misconfigurations and other security incidents. 

Some advanced CSPM tools automate the enforcement of best security practices and the remediation process of security issues.  

How Does CSPM Work?

CSPM is designed to help organizations continuously monitor, identify, and remediate security issues caused by cloud misconfigurations and compliance risks. Basically, it continuously looks for changes in your cloud environment against initial deployment and established security best practices. 

Besides identifying misconfigurations that attackers can exploit, it puts forward the best mitigation plan that can solve the issues. However, the detection and remediation capability varies according to the cloud environment and services. 

Similarly, the automation of detection and remediation of misconfiguration and compliance risks varies according to the CSPM tool. For certain regulatory standards like HIPAA, CSPM tools can be configured for continuous compliance and to ensure optimum security.

Benefits of CSPM

The number of benefits associated with CPSM is many, thus making it one of the most used security solutions in the industry. It is more than just a tool to identify misconfiguration. Here are some key benefits of CSPM: 

Centralized Visibility

One of the key benefits of CSPM is that it offers centralized visibility into cloud and multi-cloud environments by creating an inventory of all the resources. It provides real-time visibility to security and compliance so that they can easily identify and remediate misconfiguration and other issues.

Proactively Identify and Mitigate Risks

By leveraging real-time visibility, CSPM tools can proactively identify and respond to risks before they can make any significant impact. It automatically identifies misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and security issues and remediates them through automated remediation or by providing effective solutions.

Helps in Maintaining Compliance

A CSPM solution is highly effective when it comes to staying compliant with strict industry regulations like PCI DSS, GDPR, SOC 2, and HIPAA. It helps enforce best security practices and continuously monitors compliance posture. One of the best things about CSPM is that it quickly generates audit-ready reports and helps the auditors investigate potential compliance risks.

Helps in Integrating With DevOps Workflow

The CSPM tool can work with the DevOps workflow and helps the team implement security through the application development lifecycle. It enables the DevOps team to embed security at every stage of the CI/CD pipeline and ensures the application is free from vulnerability after deployment.

Effective Configuration Management

You can effectively manage your cloud configuration using the CSPM tool and ensure the configuration stays aligned with best security practices and policies. Through its centralized view, it allows the team to maintain consistent configuration through the cloud environment and prevent misconfiguration.

Limitations of CSPM

Like every security tool, CSPM also delivers many benefits and certain limitations. An organization needs to stay aware of these challenges before implementing the solutions. Here are some key limitations: 

Inability to Prevent Malware and Ransomware

When you implement a CSPM solution in your cloud environment, it can’t serve as a standard cybersecurity solution. It can only detect misconfiguration and compliance issues and is unable to detect threats like malware and ransomware.

Lack of Integration with All the Security Tools

Some CSPM tools don’t integrate seamlessly with other security tools present in your cloud infrastructure. This lack of integration not only limits the overall effectiveness but also affects the overall security.

Setup Complexity

Undoubtedly, CSPM is an excellent tool that benefits an organization in many ways, but the setup process is quite complex. Your team had to have deep knowledge to set up the tool and maintain it for an effective result.

High Resource Consumption

Since the CSPM tool continuously looks for misconfigurations, compliance issues, and assets in the cloud infrastructures, it consumes a lot of cloud resources. The continuous scanning adds to the overall operation resources and results in high operation costs.

Lacks User and Entity Behavior Analytics

One of the most significant drawbacks of the CSPM solution is that it lacks advanced user and entity behavior analytics, which is useful for malicious user activities that might compromise the infrastructure.

CIEM vs CSPM: Key Differences

CIEM and CSPM are important aspects of modern cybersecurity solutions where each solution caters to specific security requirements. Even though the primary focus is cloud security, there are some critical differences between the two:

	Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)	Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
Primary Goal	The main goal of CIEM is to manage the user’s permission level and mitigate the risk arising from it. CIEM also helps in enforcing security policies.	The primary goal of CSPM is to mitigate misconfiguration and compliance risks arising in the cloud environment.
Main Scope	CIEM is only designed to manage user and system privilege and access control to various resources in the cloud infrastructure.	CSPM not only helps an organization by mitigating misconfiguration and compliance risks but also helps in covering best security practices.
Main Function	Complete control and management of users’ access permissions to resources.	Real-time monitoring of cloud infrastructure configuration for security and compliance adherence.
Secondary Functions	Management of entitlement lifecycle along with right-sizing the level of user’s access. Continuous monitoring and identification of risks originating from unauthorized entitlement.	Discovery of misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance risks in the cloud infrastructure. Implementation of best security practices and policies to ensure adherence to industry-specific regulatory standards.
Threat Coverage	CIEM focuses on remediating overprivileged access, inactive accounts, unauthorized access, and access detail misuse by threat actors.	CSPM mainly covers threats from misconfigurations, non-compliance risks, and missing updates.
Main Use Case	Managing user and system access permission to resources.	Compliance management, assessing security posture, and detection of misconfiguration.
Tools Involved	CIEM mainly involves identity and access management tools.	CSPM encompasses automated policy enforcement, API integration, and continuous monitoring.
Scalability	It would offer the same entitlement management with an increasing number of users or roles.	It adapts according to the growth of the cloud infrastructure.
Suitable For	Entitlement and access control management.	Configuration and compliance management.

CIEM vs CSPM: Which is the Better Solution for Cloud?

Choosing between CIEM and CSPM and deciding which solution will be better for the cloud can be tricky as both of them address different security issues. CIEM helps manage permission to access cloud resources through the Zero-Trust model and POLP. It continuously checks and verifies permissions to cloud resources and prevents theft.

While CSPM aimed at discovering and mitigating cloud misconfiguration and compliance issues in the public cloud environment. It not only continuously checks the configuration of the cloud but also looks for issues associated with regulatory compliance.

To secure the cloud, you will need both security solutions, as each encompasses a specific area in cybersecurity.

Organizations that are operating in a multi-cloud environment will require both CIEM and CSPM together to prevent hackers from breaching the cloud. CSPM will continuously monitor for misconfiguration, while CIEM will manage security issues by securing entitlements and identities.

FAQ 

What is CSPM designation?

The CSPM designation stands for certified security project management, and it is a highly respected designation that addresses the unique demands of a security project manager. It is a well-known designation in the security industry that can only be achieved after certification. 

Who needs CIEM?

Every organization that needs a security tool to manage and secure user access in the cloud environment will use CIEM. Whether you have a small-scale or large organization, you will need CIEM to manage the access to resources and secure them from unauthorized usage. CIEM helps organizations enforce POPLP in the infrastructure and manage cloud entitlements. 

Why is CSPM not enough?

CSPM is a highly effective security solution that helps in identifying misconfigurations and compliance risks and helps in deploying best security practices. However, CSPM is not enough for an organization for all-around cybersecurity as it only prevents potential security attacks originating due to misconfiguration and non-compliance. Prevention and compliance through CSPM are not enough in the modern cyber landscape.

Is CSPM part of SASE?

CSPM is not a part of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), but CSPM is often combined with SASE to offer a comprehensive security solution. SASE is basically a framework that combines cloud security technologies with WAN to help organizations connect users and systems securely to the services and applications.

Conclusion

Deciding between CIEM and CSPM can be a tricky task for many organizations when they shift their workflow to the cloud. They get confused between these two security solutions as they both work towards securing the cloud infrastructure. 

However, through this article, we have created a detailed comparison of CIEM vs CSPM, where we have explained the difference between the two solutions in detail. Besides, we have also supplied many crucial details that will ease your struggle to decide which security solution will be ideal for you.