Given the current post-covid-19 context, talking about cloud security has become essential. This is because the pandemic motivated the adoption of remote work by most organizations, which resulted in a significant increase in the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure.

As you can imagine, this feature presents particularities when it comes to cybersecurity. To get a sense, Gartner predicts that companies will suffer at least 2,300 violations of entitlements policies annually by 2024.
Also according to Gartner, multi-cloud environments introduce a large cyberattack surface that can be exploited by malicious agents.

Thus, incorrectly configuring security and identity tools in cloud environments may result in severe data violations. Therefore, it is not recommended that the access policy configuration and maintenance be performed manually.

Added to this is the fact that conventional solutions, such as IGA and PAM, may not be efficient to manage this demand. In addition, with infrastructure as a service (IaaS), access management is a shared responsibility between the organization and the Cloud Service Provider (CSP). According to Gartner, 99% of data breaches occurring in a cloud environment are the responsibility of the customer, not the CSP.

In this article, we share everything you need to know about cloud security with Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM). To make our text more understandable, we divided the content by topics. These are:

• History of Cloud Computing
• What Are The Main Challenges of The Companies that Adopt this Service?
• What Is CIEM?
• Why Are CIEM Solutions Important?
• Benefits of a CIEM Solution
• How Can CIEM Be Used?
• How Can CIEM Contribute to DevOps?
• senhasegura CIEM
• Conclusion

Follow our blog post to the end!

History of Cloud Computing

In the 1950s, computers were very expensive and companies had access to few machines. For this reason, in the following decade, cloud computing began to be discussed by experts.

The first person to suggest the shared use of computers was American computer scientist John McCarthy, who named this concept Utility Computing.

In the following years, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider studied different ways to use the computer and the Network of Advanced Research Project Agencies (Arpanet), which he helped develop, enabling two or more computers to share data, even in different locations, according to the principles of accessibility and availability.

But the term “cloud computing” was only used for the first time in the second half of the 1990s, in an academic lecture given by the professor of information systems, Ramnath Chellappa. This expression is based on the symbol of the internet: the cloud.

Today, we also have the concept of multi-cloud, which consists of the use of various cloud services. These services can be provided by third-party providers or include a private cloud, whose technology is in the organization’s own data center.

This type of solution enables IT teams to perform individual operations efficiently, while reducing costs.
There is also the hybrid cloud concept, which unites public cloud services with a private cloud, simplifying remote cloud operations and providing more flexibility for businesses.

However, unlike cloud environment management, which must be managed in isolation, hybrid cloud management needs to be based on a unique strategy.

What Are The Main Challenges of The Companies that Adopt this Service?

With the evolution of technology, cloud computing has become accessible, and remote work, adopted by many organizations after the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, has made this resource widely used.

The big issue is that the larger the company, the more people will have access to cloud-based environments. Moreover, many permissions are granted to applications and machines that connect to other applications and databases to exchange information.

Thus, it is necessary to have a strategy that limits unnecessary access and prevents inadequate sharing of information, which can be achieved through CIEM.

What Is CIEM?

The purpose of Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements Management (CIEM) is to manage access in cloud and multi-cloud environments.

This is possible through the rinciple of Least Privilege, which contributes to companies that need to avoid risks such as attacks by malicious users and data breaches, problems generated by excessive permissions on this type of infrastructure.

Thus, a CIEM solution allows you to remove these excessive entitlements and centralize the visibility and control of permissions in a cloud environment.

Through the use of artificial intelligence, a CIEM solution is also able to analyze exposure levels of a company?s cloud environments, enabling the identification and reduction of cybersecurity risks.

Why Are CIEM Solutions Important?

Using cloud resources is very beneficial for businesses, as it allows them to simplify their operations and save time.

However, traditional identity and access management (IAM) tools are aimed at protecting static applications and structures rather than cloud infrastructure, which is extremely dynamic.

So, cloud providers have launched their own resources to ensure cybersecurity in this type of environment. Despite this, the dynamism and diversity of cloud environments continue to pose challenges to ensuring data protection and compliance with security policies.

After all, it is necessary to keep in mind that when a company uses the cloud to become more efficient, it can increase its attack surfaces with the excess of permissions in that environment. To make things worse, in such cases, it may not have the visibility and control necessary to apply the principle of the least privilege.

In this sense, CIEM solutions are essential to improve visibility, identify and correct access-related misconfiguration with minimal privileges in cloud and multi-cloud infrastructures, and thus ensure the organization’s cybersecurity.

Benefits of a CIEM Solution

A CIEM solution can generate several benefits for an organization. Check out the main ones below:

• Cybersecurity teams are able to create and maintain an inventory with all permissions in the cloud environment;
• Identify normal operations in the cloud environment, also detecting abnormal operations;
  This feature allows identifying external or internal risks, which may be associated with human action, such as errors and disregard for the company’s security policies;
• Points out misconfigured permissions, unused privileges, or rights that conflict with corporate policy;
• By making it possible to differentiate the necessary permissions from the excessive ones, it helps to automate the process of excluding improper privileges;
• Detects high priority problems and suggestcorrection plans;
• Reduces the attack surface through the implementation of the principle of least privilege;
• Enables the implementation of uniform protections across multi-cloud environments; and
• Allows the DevOps team to review all permissions granted to users and machines.

In the following topic, we coverthese benefits from another perspective: by showing how CIEM can be used to ensure more cybersecurity for companies.

How Can CIEM Be Used?

Good IT security requires discovering and classifying identities and recognizing permissions granted to people and machines in order to prevent data breaches. In this sense, CIEM can be used to:

• Ensure that permissions are used appropriately, with segregation of duties, which means the person controlling the keys to encrypt data should not have the role of decrypting such data.
• CIEM enables continuous monitoring of identities and permissions, including changes in rights;
• Monitor whether someone has received more permissions than necessary to perform their activities, correcting this problem, which puts organizations at risk;
• Ensure visibility of identities and rights, enabling more efficient management of these permissions.

How Can CIEM Contribute to DevOps?

For DevOps teams, managing cloud computing while maintaining information security can be challenging, after all, their priorities are speed and innovation rather than security.

This is because the services must be launched or provisioned with agility, which ends up causing an excessive granting of permissions. However, the manual blocking of these rights is complex and compromises the fundamental speed for this type of operation.

With CIEM, one can eliminate excessive permissions automatically, without interrupting developers, who can deploy code quickly and securely.

senhasegura Cloud Entitlements

Check out the advantages of using the senhasegura Cloud Entitlements:

• Promotes access governance, since it grants visibility to unnecessary privileges, without interrupting or delaying the work of developers;
• Allows organizations to comply with strict data privacy policies, such as GDPR, LGPD, and CCPA;
• Contributes to permissions risk management and helps prevent data breaches and theft in cloud environments;
• The management of access keys generated in CSPs, carried out by senhasegura, makes it possible to minimize the attack surface for malicious users and open-source software from third parties;
• This tool also allows adopting the principles of privileged access management (PAM) in cloud environments in order to reduce obsoleteand unnecessary permissions;
• Senhasegura Cloud Entitlements also enables automation in compliance with regulations such as GDPR, SOX, and PCI Data Security Standard.

Conclusion

By reading this article, you saw that:

• Cloud computing is a technology that began to be required in the 1950s, due to the high cost for companies to have access to computers;
• CIEM is a resource that allows you to manage access in cloud and multi-cloud environments;
• Traditional identity and access management (IAM) toolsare not suitable for cloud infrastructure, which has great dynamism, so CIEM is necessary in this case;
• A CIEM solution has several advantages, such as reducing the attack surface through the principle of least privilege, thus avoiding data breaches;
• Another great benefit is to enable more visibility and control of identities and rights, detecting excessive permissions and allowing them to be corrected.
• It can also contribute to DevOps, providing security without compromising the speed of releases or provisioning;
• To conclude, you learned about the senhasegura Cloud Entitlementsmodule, which can make all the difference in the cybersecurity of your company.

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