What Is Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management?
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) tools map and right-size entitlements within a cloud platform: which identities can do what to which resource, where standing privilege exceeds actual usage, and where a role grants far more than the workload behind it needs. Within a single cloud provider, that analysis can be genuinely deep, down to the individual permission on the individual resource.
A typical CIEM deployment produces least-privilege recommendations, flags unused permissions for removal, and surfaces "toxic combinations", pairs of entitlements that are individually reasonable but dangerous together, like the ability to create a new identity and grant it administrative rights.
The boundary is the cloud provider itself. A CIEM tool scoped to one cloud has no visibility into a privilege path that starts in that cloud and continues into an on-prem system, a SaaS admin console, or a second cloud provider, because the correlation stops at the platform boundary it was built for.