As more services and applications migrate to the cloud, businesses are desperate for effective cloud security across their modern enterprise environments. Tools like cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) are becoming integral for maintaining a solid cloud security posture. However, some DevOps and security teams may miss the distinction between these two tools and what each offers to enterprise cybersecurity.

This article will describe each tool and its key distinctions. We’ll discuss their features, capabilities, and functions within cloud security. Then, we’ll look at how CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security integrates both tools in a single platform to help modern enterprises secure their cloud.

What is CIEM?

CIEM is a “security process that helps security teams analyze and manage identities, access rights, privileges, and permissions in cloud environments.” These entitlements range from accessing a cloud platform's web console and databases to API access to your deployed applications on that cloud platform. With CIEM tools, security teams can manage entitlements more effectively, as they can use them to review cloud roles and access to provisioned resources. Key features of CIEM include:

• Granular access control: A CIEM tool will assess whether roles used in your organization meet the principle of least privilege (POLP). The foundational concept of POLP is to allow users access to only the information required for their tasks, ensuring overly permissive access isn’t granted.
• Role optimization: CIEM tools also assist teams in optimizing roles and permissions to balance security, efficiency, and ease of development. This optimization reduces the chance of security issues slipping through, since there are fewer roles that can be compromised.
• Ephemeral resource management: The ephemeral nature of cloud resources — which are provisioned and deprovisioned in response to application demand — makes it challenging to audit and review the access apps have to other resources. CIEM tools allow for the constant review of these resources to ensure that they are only accessing the resources they are entitled to.

The benefits of CIEM

A CIEM tool prevents privilege abuse that might result from the accidental or malicious use of roles on a cloud platform. It offers enhanced observability for cloud resource access through active and automatic monitoring, allowing for quick or automated action to be taken by teams to lock down cloud resources.

CIEM tools also help your organization meet compliance requirements by acting as a nexus for access control in an enterprise setting. DevOps and security teams can use CIEM tools to centralize collected audit information on the current state of their cloud access control.

What is CSPM?

CSPM provides “visibility into your cloud security and strengthens your compliance posture by automating the identification and remediation of risks across cloud infrastructures.” Continuous monitoring tracks what is being provisioned in the cloud to ensure it meets an organization's threshold for cloud security risks.

CSPM tools enable continuous monitoring of your cloud security posture and offer the following key features:

• Discovery and visibility: Discovering and maintaining visibility over all your organization's cloud resources can be difficult. Trying to manually audit what has been deployed and what’s in use is no longer feasible or reasonable. CSPM tools provide a single source of truth across multi-cloud environments to create a continuous inventory of your organization's resources — with minimal manual input. This makes it easier for organizations to review and report on their cloud security posture, a requirement for maintaining compliance in regulated industries. CSPM can potentially save analysts and developers hours of time gathering and verifying information.
• Misconfiguration management: CSPM tools monitor cloud resources for misconfigurations and potential security vulnerabilities. Small, simple misconfiguration mistakes in a single cloud component can result in large security and risk impacts. Therefore, continuous real-time monitoring and alerting of potential misconfigurations is critical.
• Continuous threat detection: CSPM tools can proactively identify and mitigate resource threats on a cloud platform, providing a central point for monitoring an organization's cloud security status. These threats can include open ports as well as deprecated packages, runtimes, or security groups. With real-time monitoring, organizations can avoid the need for manual auditing, opening up time for more complex analysis or remediation of security issues.
• DevOps integration: Through integrations with DevOps tooling, CSPM tools provide developers and security engineers with a central platform for the visibility and automated control of cloud resources in alignment with an organization's DevOps standards.

The benefits of CSPM

By adopting CSPM tools, your organization can improve its visibility of cloud resources, asserting more control over their configurations to ensure tighter security. CSPM allows DevOps and security teams to take a proactive risk management posture by ensuring continued compliance and threat mitigation for cloud environments.

Key distinctions between CIEM and CSPM

CIEM and CSPM tools are both feature-rich tools that teams can utilize for cloud security, but they’re not interchangeable. They serve different use cases.

CIEM is ideal for complex, multi-cloud environments requiring detailed access control audits. For organizations using multiple cloud platforms, a CIEM tool applies consistent cloud access policies across platforms.

CSPM tools provide active monitoring — even in multi-cloud environments — to detect resource misconfigurations and maintain compliance. A CSPM tool helps you ensure deployed resources align with your organization’s security best practices and policies.

Although CIEM and CSPM are distinct, implementing both tools can improve an organization’s cloud security posture, ensure its application's cloud resources are secure, and reduce its attack surface. By integrating features like real-time monitoring with these tools, developers can substitute regular, tedious reporting for more engaging and critical analysis or development tasks related to an organization's cloud security.

CrowdStrike secures your cloud with CIEM and CSPM

Using CIEM and CSPM tools allows teams and organizations to better manage their cloud environments and improve visibility of security and compliance issues. CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security offers comprehensive cloud security capabilities — including CIEM and CSPM — in a single, dynamic platform that smoothly integrates into your existing workflows and automation.

Request a 15-day free trial to see how the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform can improve your organization's cloud security posture today.