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The Essential Role of CIEM: Stopping Multi-Cloud Identity-based Threats

By: Becca Gomby

Oct 4, 2024

Enterprises are increasingly adopting multi-cloud environments to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of different cloud platforms. However, this shift has also introduced a major security challenge: the rise of identity-based threats. With 82% of data breaches now involving cloud-stored data, securing cloud identities has become a critical need. The complexity of managing identities and permissions across multiple cloud platforms only amplifies the risks. Attackers can exploit mismanaged entitlements or overly broad permissions to gain unauthorized access, leaving organizations vulnerable to significant data loss.

Gartner recently identified the shift toward an identity-centric approach to security as a top trend for 2024. This reflects the growing recognition that securing cloud identities is no longer optional—it's essential.

In this post, we’ll look at some best practices that we believe will become important for combatting access management threats in the coming years. We’ll dive into two key concepts: identity and access management (IAM) and cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM). We’ll especially consider how CIEM improves your organization’s cloud security posture around access. Finally, we’ll look at other key contributors to securing your data and cloud assets, including AI and zero-trust architectures.

Managing the Complexities of Multi-Cloud Security

The adoption of multi-cloud environments is becoming the norm, with 87% of organizations embracing multi-cloud strategies. This trend brings about complex security challenges, as each cloud provider has its own set of identity and access management (IAM) tools and policies. Managing all the entitlements across the infrastructure manually is not only inefficient, but also prone to errors.

Cloud environments are designed to be flexible and scalable. Resources such as virtual machines, storage, and serverless functions can be provisioned and deprovisioned on-demand. This elasticity means that access permissions need to be applied for and revoked just as quickly as resources are provisioned. On top of this, organizations need mechanisms for visibility and accounting; that way, they know what permissions belong to resources and users at any given moment.

The complexity does not stop there. Developers often need elevated permissions for debugging deployed applications or doing infrastructure-focused work. Similarly, CI/CD pipelines automate the creation and destruction of environments for testing, staging, and production purposes. These tools necessitate fluid access controls, carefully managed to prevent security gaps.

Lastly, each cloud service provider (such as AWS, GCP, and Azure) handles IAM in its own way, with varying options and features. In large organizations, IAM might be decentralized, with individual teams configuring their own permissions, which can lead to gaps and inconsistent policies.

Amidst these challenges, enterprises increasingly lean on CIEM solutions to identify and address permissioning issues. CIEM automates and centralizes permission management across cloud infrastructures to reduce the complexity of multi-cloud deployments. CIEM tools also continually monitor and evaluate IAM policies for cases such as:

Over-permissioning. Example: A developer was granted elevated privileges in response to an outage, but those privileges were never removed after remediation.

Regulatory compliance. Example: Because of GDPR, a user should be able to access their data, but cannot.

CIEM solutions can address these types of IAM violations automatically in many situations, further streamlining identity management.

Identity as the New Perimeter

The traditional security perimeter, once defined by physical boundaries like firewalls, no longer applies in cloud environments. With the shift to cloud and the mainstreaming of remote work, identity has become the new perimeter: access control now revolves around verifying who or what is accessing your systems.

This shift places a critical focus on properly managing and securing identities. Attackers target identity systems to exploit weak or mismanaged credentials, gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data. Without strong identity controls, organizations are left vulnerable. Therefore, continuous verification of every access request is key. CIEM plays a vital role by ensuring that identity remains the central line of defense.

Preserving Privacy

Increasing concerns over data privacy and the need to comply with stringent data protection regulations (such as GDPR, CCPA, and revDSG) make it important for enterprises to consider how to safeguard the privacy of their users and customers.

The key to achieving privacy in a secure environment is to practice data minimization while also using intelligent data processing to ensure personal information is used only for authorized purposes.

Data minimization means collecting only essential data—the bare minimum amount of data you need. This reduces the risk and impact of a data breach (hackers can’t steal what you don’t have). Enable user consent and control early. This ensures users have control over their data and understand how it will be used. Provide built-in anonymization and pseudonymization, as these techniques can protect user identities while still enabling necessary data processing.

The benefits of preserving privacy techniques in IAM-governed cloud systems include:

Enhanced compliance with data protection laws

Reduced risk of data breaches

Increased user trust through better data handling practices

Addressing Identity-Based Threats with CIEM

As identity-based threats grow more sophisticated, organizations need tools that offer robust control and protection across all cloud platforms. CIEM is designed to tackle these challenges by providing visibility, automation, and governance, making it a critical component of any security strategy.Multi-cloud visibility and control

CIEM gives organizations a comprehensive view of identities and permissions across multiple cloud environments. This visibility helps prevent permission sprawl and ensures that access rights are properly managed. With this level of centralized control, a security teamscan easily spot inconsistencies and gaps in permissions, minimizing the attack surfaces across cloud services.

Automated risk management

Continuous identity risk remediation gives you automated remediation, meaning it is always looking for access policy misconfigurations and fixing them. With this capability, a security solution is always working to rightsize permissions.

It seems like this capability would be non-negotiable for cloud security solutions; but few tools offer a comprehensive, multi-cloud solution for this task. Continuous identity risk remediation brings you real-time monitoring, keeping track of identity-related activities to detect and respond to potential threats promptly. Lastly, it provides set-and-forget policy enforcement, ensuring that security and regulatory policies are consistently applied across all environments.

Panoptica’s Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) capabilities provide continuous identity risk remediation out of the box. With it, your organization has always-on monitoring for the complexities and pitfalls mentioned above.

Compliance and governance

CIEM helps maintain compliance by enforcing least privilege access and automatically auditing identity permissions. This automated governance not only reduces manual errors but also provides an audit trail that simplifies the compliance process, keeping your organization in line with regulatory standards.

Integration with a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP)

An organization can best leverage CIEM when it is integrated into a CNAPP, part of a broader cybersecurity solution. By combining identity management with other security layers like workload protection and compliance monitoring, a CNAPP ensures that security is built into the entire application lifecycle. This integration reduces the complexity of managing multiple tools while enhancing the overall security posture of cloud-native environments.User and Entity Behavior Analytics

User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) is a cybersecurity approach that leverages AI, machine learning (ML), and advanced analytics to examine the behaviors of users and entities within a cloud ecosystem. UEBA identifies deviations from normal behavior patterns, which can indicate potential security threats such as:

Insider threats

Compromised accounts

Other malicious activities

For example, if a user normally only logs into the system from North America on weekday afternoons, but they suddenly appear to be logging in late at night from Eastern Europe, then UEBA will alert you to respond.

UEBA systems provide the following key capabilities:

Anomaly detection: Identifying unusual behavior that may indicate security threats.

Risk-based authentication: Adjusting security measures based on the perceived risk level.

Automated threat response: Using AI to automatically mitigate identified risks.

A UEBA system learns and evolves. As more training data is collected, these systems improve their performance. This also means they enable proactive threat detection and prevention, ultimately reducing incident response times. IAM systems can integrate with UEBA systems to ensure that they are continuously monitored for violations.

Panoptica implemented UEBA in its Attack-Path Analysis and Smart Cloud Detection and Response features. In both cases, continuous monitoring enables the analysis of real-time data to detect possible breaches and attacks. Both automated and human-in-the-loop responses are possible, depending on risk assessment and organization procedures.

Zero-trust Architectures

Traditional perimeter-based security models (such as firewalls or virtual private clouds) are insufficient for increasingly complex and distributed IT environments. The zero-trust security model ensures every access request is authenticated and authorized, regardless of its origin. This continuous validation of users and devices enhances security.

A zero-trust architecture is defined by the following characteristics:

Continuous verification: Regularly validating the identity and trustworthiness of users and devices.

Least-privilege access: Granting only the necessary permissions to users, minimizing potential damage from breaches.

Micro-segmentation: Dividing networks into smaller segments to contain breaches and limit access.

Implementing these best practices in your cloud ecosystems leads to enhanced security through continuous monitoring, thereby reducing the risk of unauthorized access and improving your operational control over network and data access within your cloud resources.

CIEM systems generally operate in accordance with the zero-trust model, as all the standard characteristics are met. CIEM from Panoptica offers these protections. An organization simply needs to place its IAM assets underneath the umbrella of Panoptica’s CIEM for effective management.

Conclusion

Modern IT environments are dynamic and complex, often distributed across multiple clouds. Traditional IAM controls are no longer sufficient. As today’s enterprises look for a better solution, they’re turning to CIEM. Coupled with technologies such as continuous identity risk remediation, user and entity behavior analytics, and zero trust, CIEM solutions help preserve privacy for your users and data while working to eliminate security and permissioning gaps.

Throughout this article, we’ve considered how Panoptica from Outshift by Cisco provides a comprehensive implementation of these best practices. Take the next step and request a demo of Panoptica to understand how it can help your organization establish a proactive security posture that prevents IAM security breaches.