CSPM, CNAPP, IAM, PAM, CIEM: two disciplines long kept separate — cloud security and identity security — increasingly handled together, because that's where most real incidents happen.
Historically two separate disciplines — but most cloud incidents today don't come from an infrastructure bug: they come from a misconfigured permission, an over-privileged identity, or a forgotten access key. Securing the cloud without addressing the identities accessing it leaves the most-used door wide open.
The continuous assessment of a cloud environment to detect misconfigurations, policy violations, exposed assets, and compliance gaps — checked continuously against best-practice benchmarks. A storage bucket accidentally made public, an overly permissive security group: exactly what CSPM catches.
The convergence point: a single platform bringing together CSPM, workload security, cloud identity security (CIEM), and infrastructure-as-code scanning, instead of stacking separate tools that don't talk to each other.
The set of rules and policies controlling who has access to what, when, and how — authentication, password management, MFA, single sign-on, a user account's full lifecycle from creation to deletion.
Also see Zero TrustA specialized subset of IAM, focused exclusively on high-risk access — system administration, sensitive data, critical configuration. The principle: restrict elevated access strictly to those who genuinely need it, and only for as long as needed.
Measures and right-sizes the permissions every identity actually holds in the cloud — including machine identities (service accounts, automated roles) that classic IAM and PAM tend not to cover. IAM, PAM, and CIEM are three complementary layers of identity security, not three names for the same tool.
Every identity — human or machine — should only have access to what's strictly necessary for its function, nothing more. In practice, most cloud accounts accumulate permissions over time without ever losing them: regularly auditing rights actually used (as opposed to rights granted) is what closes that gap.
Remove standing access in favor of temporary, on-demand access, require MFA everywhere without exception, regularly audit unused permissions, and treat every new cloud resource as an asset to monitor from the moment it's created — not after the fact.
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