CIEM vs CSPM: The Essential Guide to Cloud Security Tools

To what extent do organizations need fine-grained access control? Or is broader coverage over cloud infrastructure a bigger immediate risk to manage? Which aligns better with GDPR? SOC 2? To counter immediate risk? And is combining these cloud tools just a path to duplicate coverage? Those are all good questions that point to the reality of security tools like CIEM and CSPM: you likely need features from both tools. 

We’ve compared cloud security posture management to cloud-native application protection platforms (CSPM to CNAPP) and CSPM vs. CWPP (cloud workforce protection platforms). Now we’re digging into the deeper questions about cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) vs. CSPM, going beyond the basics and thinking about specific cloud ecosystems, maturity, and security risks. 

CIEM Fundamentals: Beyond Basic Access Management

CIEM is a security tool that manages and monitors permissions across cloud environments to enforce least privilege access. It identifies and remediates excessive, misconfigured, or unused permissions to prevent identity-based threats and limit attack surfaces.

CIEM is especially useful in a cloud environment that relies heavily on identity-based access, with resources accessed via APIs, roles, and permissions. This reality makes cloud computing especially vulnerable to attacks that capitalize on permissions: privilege escalation, lateral movement, data exfiltration, and IAM misconfiguration exploits.

The key functions of a CIEM include:

• Rightsizing access
• Cloud identity risk visibility
• Comprehensive IAM management
• Activity monitoring
• Automatic risk assessment
• Anomaly detection
• Integration with security tools

Let’s look at each in the context of how that looks and functions differently than in a CSPM solution.

Rightsizing Access

Rightsizing access means enforcing least privilege access policies and reducing over-privileged accounts. A typical CIEM works to rightsize access by analyzing identity behaviors, such as unused permissions or service account overuse, and recommending precise adjustments like removing access privileges or limiting resource-specific access.

A CSPM rightsizes access by identifying over-permissive policies in the context of misconfigurations or compliance violations. CSPM tools often provide options to revoke privileges but lack more fine-tuned options like context-specific downgrades.

Cloud Identity Risk Visibility

Simplifying detection and remediation of misconfigured permissions. 

This capability identifies permissions after these identities have been granted and are in use. It offers transparency about who has access to what, and then simplifies granular remediation, from removing access to altering permission levels. It’s similar to rightsizing access, but it happens after the fact  — and CIEM typically has more granular remediation capabilities than CSPM, like downgrading permissions or limiting access to specific resources.

Comprehensive IAM Management

IAM management involves handling permissions for both user and non-human identities in cloud environments. 

CIEM tools go deep on identity; they don’t integrate identity management into broader security risk as teams will get with CSPM features. So, for example, while CIEM tools offer proactive remediation on excessive permissions, CSPM might flag that a storage bucket is public and link that misconfiguration to misconfigured access controls and broader system exposure.

Activity Monitoring

Activity monitoring involves tracking user and service account activities to identify risky behavior.

CIEM uses behavioral analysis to monitor user activities, such as normal login habits, API calls, and account behaviors. The behaviors it analyzes are all linked to identity; for instance, if a user typically logs onto a system from the US during business hours but unexpectedly logs on from another country overnight, a CIEM tool would flag this anomaly. 

CSPMs typically work a little differently — they flag overly permissive policies as part of broader security concerns.

Automated Risk Assessment

Automated risk assessment means looking at access patterns to assess and manage security risks without manual intervention.

CIEM uses continuous monitoring to scan the cloud environment, tracking user activities and entitlements in real time. It maps entitlements across users and groups to identify overprivileged or dormant accounts. CIEM also enforces security policies, revoking permissions to enforce least privilege access or granting temporary access for certain tasks. CIEM tools prioritize potential security risks based on behavioral analysis — but remember, that analysis is focused on identities and user behavior.

A typical CSPM focuses on misconfigurations and may not employ extensive behavioral analysis for risk prioritization at all. But combined in a comprehensive CNAPP, CIEM’s behavior analysis and CSPM’s misconfiguration scanning can work together to identify the biggest misconfiguration risks that are critical.

Anomaly Detection

To detect changed behaviors in an environment, CIEM leverages machine learning to detect unusual permission usage or excessive access. Anomalies it detects are all related to users and identities, so teams will get alerts to unusual sign-ins, unauthorized access attempts, suspicious API calls, and unexpected escalation of privileges. Alerts will be context-aware, too, meaning they’ll consider time, location, and resource sensitivity.

A stand-alone CSPM tool identifies unusual changes in cloud configurations, policy violations, and deviations from security best practices. 

Combining both? That’s a better approach. Anomalous user activities (found with CIEM capabilities) can be combined with misconfigurations unearthed by CSPM to identify potential attack vectors and automatically prioritize relevant configurations for remediation.

Integration with Security Tools

CIEM tools frequently integrate with CNAPPs, security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, identity and access management (IAM) tools, and DevOps workflows. Overall, teams see strong integration with complementary identity-centric tools.

CSPM comes with a different set of core integrations: cloud access security brokers (CASBs), DevSecOps tools, compliance frameworks, multi-cloud environments, and container orchestration platforms, all allowing for a more holistic approach to cloud security. 

While there is some overlap (e.g., both tools integrate with CNAPPs), the specific tools they integrate with tend to align with their primary focus areas.

While CIEM and CSPM serve specific purposes, their combined use can elevate both. In a comprehensive CNAPP, users can use CIEM and CSPM capabilities, like utilizing CIEM’s granular monitoring of identity behaviors to highlight anomalous API calls, while using CSPM features to reveal the misconfigured permissions or resource exposures that enable those behaviors. 

The combination leaves teams with a deeper context to prioritize threats more effectively, and the approach works even better in a modern cloud ecosystem where layered visibility is necessary for comprehensive protection. 

How did we get here? An overview of the evolution of misconfiguration and access helps show why a layered approach is the norm today.

The Evolution of Cloud Security Tools

As more organizations have moved their data and operations to the cloud, traditional security tools like endpoint protection and network defenses have increasingly failed to defend critical systems. After all, sensitive data now lives in public, private, or hybrid clouds, as opposed to servers defended behind a perimeter of network firewalls. Today, insiders can be threats, and legitimate service accounts and employees access resources from “outside” what were once logical boundaries.

This shift in operations necessitates a subsequent evolution in security tooling. Now that cloud infrastructure has enabled a “work-from-anywhere” mentality, data and applications also need to be available with little more than an internet connection. 

Enter CIEM and CSPM — tools designed to address the unique challenges of cloud-native environments. CIEM’s ability to manage identity risks and CSPM’s focus on configuration vulnerabilities reflect a broader trend: security strategies need to become more specialized to respond to modern threats. 

Yet the rise of these tools isn’t about replacing traditional methods; it’s about layering protections in a way that reflects today’s decentralized reality.

When used together, CIEM and CSPM create a security fabric stronger than the sum of its parts. CIEM ensures identities are managed and monitored in real time, closing gaps in privilege abuse and misused credentials, while CSPM reduces systemic risks by remediating misconfigurations. Combined in a CNAPP, these tools can correlate insights and automate remediation to minimize both identity and infrastructure risks.

Comparing CIEM, CSPM…And More

The decision on which tool to use isn’t just about choosing between CIEM and CSPM. It’s about understanding how these tools complement each other and where they fit within the broader ecosystem, including IAM and CNAPP solutions. 

So let’s focus on different ways to address identity-centric risks, add layered security reassurance, and respond to cloud ecosystem complexity, industry requirements, and resource availability.

Capability	CIEM	CSPM	IAM	CNAPP
Primary Focus	Identity and security access	Cloud misconfigurations	Credential and policy control	Comprehensive cloud security
Key Use Cases	Rightsizing access, anomaly detection	Compliance, policy violations	Defining access policies	Correlating identity and configuration risks
Granularity	High (individual permissions)	Moderate (system-level)	Moderate (role-based policies)	High (cross-domain insights)
Behavioral Analysis	Yes	Limited	No	Yes (often via CIEM integration)
Integration Scope	Identity-focused tools	Multi-cloud platforms, CASBs	Infrastructure-level	Identity, workloads, configurations
Best For	Reducing excessive permissions	Ensuring compliance and broad risk	Credential management	Unified cloud risk visibility

In general, teams choose CIEM tools when they want an emphasis on identity security in the cloud environment. They’ll get to address dynamic cloud identities, including users and service accounts and automated processes. They’ll be able to enforce least privilege access and detect privilege misuse in this environment.

On the other hand, CSPM users take a broader, system-level view, identifying risks like public-facing resources, weak configurations, and policy violations. They’re there to make sure the cloud ecosystem follows security best practices.

IAM is a foundation of CIEM, and teams may use it when they don’t yet require all the features of CIEM. For instance, IAM defines roles, policies, and permissions. It establishes who can access what resources and under what conditions. 

For organizations with straightforward access requirements and minimal cloud complexity, IAM’s capabilities are often sufficient. Further, there are often built-in IAM solutions offered by public cloud providers, which can boost identity and access security adequately for organizations working in a single cloud, or with clear, predictable policies that don’t require dynamic adjustment.

When do organizations need to add CIEM? These teams are looking to:

• Continuously monitor least privilege access
• Monitor and remediate unused or excessive permissions
• Detect and respond to anomalous identity behaviors

When they face these challenges, CIEM becomes an important extension of IAM, with advanced capabilities to manage cloud identities.

Teams that have begun to incorporate multiple layered tools, like CIEM, IAM, and CSPM, but have lost cohesiveness and face scalability issues and multi-tool frustrations begin to need CNAPP’s capabilities to correlate and combine tool features into a single pane of glass.

They’ll be able to span providers, including hybrid and multi-cloud environments (even on-premises environments), and unify identity, infrastructure, and workload security.

Here’s how they’ll use each tool to assess the environment and manage remediation:

	CIEM	CSPM	IAM	CNAPP
Remediation Approach	Granular (least privilege adjustments)	Broad (system or policy-level fixes)	Static (policy-based)	Correlated (infrastructure + identity-based)
Automation	Behavior-driven, real-time adjustments	Rule-based, configuration-centric	Limited to pre-defined policies	Integrated automation across domains
When to Deploy	Identity-heavy environments	Multi-cloud or regulated environments	General use for basic cloud access	Complex, multi-cloud environments for holistic protection

So is CSPM best for all regulated environments, and CIEM best for all organizations that need fine-grained controls? Let’s go a little deeper:

	CIEM	CSPM	IAM	CNAPP
GDPR Compliance	Essential for least privilege enforcement, critical for managing user and service account access to sensitive data	Strong for identifying misconfigurations related to data exposure	Basic role management for data access	Combines CIEM and CSPM capabilities, ideal for comprehensive GDPR compliance
SOC 2 Compliance	Useful for managing access control (Confidentiality) and ensuring minimal privilege	Essential for demonstrating system hardening and policy enforcement	Provides foundational controls	Best for mapping and addressing risks across identities and configurations for SOC 2
Regulation Handling (General)	Best for identity and access compliance (e.g., NIST 800-53 Access Control family)	Broad compliance across cloud infrastructure, ideal for multi-cloud environments	Limited to access policies and logs, often insufficient alone	Most effective for unified compliance across complex requirements
Fine-Grained Controls Needed	Necessary when managing dynamic environments with multiple roles and resource dependencies	Needed when addressing misconfigured cloud resources impacting broad security	Rarely needed unless addressing highly specific role overlaps	Combines fine-grained identity and configuration insights for layered protection
Fine-Grained Controls Provided	Identity behaviors, unused permission detection, anomaly-based adjustments, resource-specific privileges	Configuration settings, excessive resource exposure, compliance violations	Role and group definitions	Granular identity controls from CIEM + contextual remediation from CSPM

The rise of CIEM and CSPM reflects the growing specialization needed in cloud ecosystems, addressing specific threats in the environment. But the tools are foundational, and eventually, scalability requires an overhead view of an organization’s large, decentralized environment. That doesn’t mean organizations no longer need the granularity that specialized tools provide. 

Overall, the question is not, “Which is the right tool?” but “Which is the right combination of tools now and into the future?” It’s a question that needs to be answered in the context of the regulatory environment, cloud ecosystem, and level of automation and granularity needed.

Building a Better Toolkit

Building a comprehensive cloud security strategy involves leveraging a range of cloud protection solutions across all security layers. 

First, check KPIs. 

The success metrics that determine which tool to implement should be tied to the overall security goals of the organization. Key metrics might include the number of misconfigurations detected and resolved, or adherence to identity and access policies. A CSPM is the better solution to achieve the former metric, while a CIEM is the better solution for the latter. Need both? Choose a CNAPP solution that includes both and has added insights they wouldn’t contribute when working alone.

Second, consider continuous improvement as a crucial part of any cloud security strategy. 

As the cloud landscape evolves, organizations must regularly review and adjust their policies, tools, and workflows to stay ahead of emerging threats and new compliance requirements. Cloud-native organizations may find value in adopting a CNAPP to help with this goal, streamlining processes across various security layers, from identity management to configuration monitoring.

Improve Cloud Security with Upwind

Upwind’s CNAPP combines CIEM and CSPM capabilities, so teams understand access anomalies in the context of misconfigurations. It’s whole-ecosystem insight that tames cloud complexity and amplifies the capabilities of either tool in isolation.

With real-time monitoring and advanced compliance controls, teams lose no time in addressing access anomalies while streamlining compliance with regulatory and auditing requirements. 

To learn more about what CIEM and CSPM look like when they team up for better performance, schedule a demo.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do CIEM and CSPM complement each other in practice?

Cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions complement each other because, although they focus on different challenges within cloud security, those challenges are related and often causal.

CIEMs emphasize identity and access management, ensuring that only authorized human and machine identities can access cloud resources.

CSPMs monitor for misconfigurations and compliance gaps. 

Combine the two tools and teams can more easily spot the misconfigurations that lead to identity anomalies and that are creating the biggest security threats in their environment.

Why isn’t CSPM alone enough for cloud security?

No one builds perfectly. Even if they did, new vulnerabilities are identified all the time, while others may not emerge until runtime.

CSPM alone isn’t enough for cloud security because its primary focus is identifying configuration issues and compliance gaps, but these tools can’t detect and respond to real-time threats like malicious activity, advanced attacks, or data breaches that might occur within a cloud environment. In the end, CSPM tools are one layer of protection, and teams will need additional security tools to cover all the layers in their ecosystems.

What role does CIEM play in zero-trust architecture?

Zero-trust is a model whereby all traffic is presumed risky. There are no “insiders” in this security framework, where all access and identities need to be verified, and none are trusted implicitly. Zero-trust involves: 

• Enforcing least privilege access across users, applications, and resources
• Continuous monitoring and behavioral analytics for anomaly detection
• Context-aware access control based on user, device, and location
• Automated policy enforcement and real-time threat response
• Continuous identity verification and multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Microsegmentation to isolate workloads and limit lateral movement
• Strong encryption for data in transit and at rest
• Integration with endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools

CIEM provides for the first three tasks, and takes on some components of automated policy enforcement, too, in terms of least privilege access.

Can CIEM replace traditional IAM solutions?

No, CIEMs can’t completely upend IAM solutions. Here’s why:

• IAM is foundational, not simply in the cloud, but across IT infrastructure on-prem and in the cloud. CIEM adds the advanced features needed to secure identities in the cloud environment.
• IAM is often tied to particular cloud providers (e.g., AWS, GPC) and relies on them to enforce policies.
• IAM handles tasks CIEM does not — like the creation of credentials.