Best Practice: Enabling Visibility as Part of Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM)
The goal is to constantly track ALL existing connections between identities, the actions they can perform and the resources on which they can perform them.
Today’s modern enterprises rely heavily on cloud infrastructure, and permissions are essentially the backbone of access to cloud based resources. To effectively manage entitlements – access to your organization’s resources such as sensitive data and mission critical assets – the core proficiencies you need are: access to an inventory of all your cloud identities and resources, and; the ability to maintain an up-to-date catalog of the permissions that any identity in your cloud infrastructure has to any resource.
Simply put: your strategic goal should be to list and constantly track ALL existing connections between identities, the actions they can perform and the resources on which they can perform them.
The task may sound simple yet reality makes it difficult. The dynamic nature of cloud environments and the complexity of the permissions structures makes the task hard and nearly impossible to execute without dedicated technology and/or expertise. Despite the difficulty, given their importance, managing access permissions properly can be an incredibly effective guide to managing your entire cloud security strategy – and, as such, well worth your while.
