Taming the cloud identity explosion: how Delinea mastered CIEM, PAM bypass detection and rightsizing
Imagine auditing your cloud infrastructure and discovering that an unmanaged local IAM user, created by a developer six months ago outside your central identity provider, currently sits in your AWS environment with full AdministratorAccess. Worse yet, a legitimate user in Microsoft Entra ID has bypassed your PAM security controls entirely, logging directly into critical resources using unmanaged local credentials.
In modern multi-cloud architectures, identity is the new perimeter. But between human users, federated SSO accounts, contractor credentials, and thousands of machine identities (like Azure Service Principals and AWS IAM Roles), permissions multiply at a rate no security team can manage manually.
This is where Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) combined with robust Privileged Access Management (PAM) becomes mandatory.
Below is an in-depth breakdown of how the Delinea Platform solves the multi-cloud entitlement challenge: mapping complex effective access, shutting down Shadow IT and PAM bypasses, and automatically right-sizing over-privileged cloud identities.
1. Discovery: Uncovering Every Hidden Permission Across Multi-Cloud
Most cloud security tools give you a superficial view: “User A belongs to Group B.” But cloud IAM policies don’t work in straight lines. Between inherited group policies, inline JSON statements, cross-account trust relationships, and conditional access rules, what an identity can actually do is rarely what it looks like on paper.
Delinea cuts through this noise by calculating Net-Effective Access.
How Delinea discovers entitlements:
- Continuous Identity Discovery (CID): Delinea continuously queries cloud provider APIs across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP to index every human and non-human identity.
- Effective Access Mapping: Instead of just reading policy attachments, Delinea evaluates the net-effective permissions across complex IAM graphs.
- Cross-Cloud Visualization: Disparate IAM schemas are unified into a centralized visual relationship tree via tools like Delinea’s Access Explorer.
2. Unmasking Shadow IT & Privileged PAM Bypasses
Shadow IT isn’t just an unapproved SaaS app; it’s unmonitored local credentials created outside your Central Identity Provider (IdP) or users circumventing enterprise vaulting workflows entirely. Delinea addresses both vectors head-on.
Vector A: detecting unmanaged local accounts (Shadow IT)
When developers bypass centralized Identity Provider provisioning (e.g., Okta or Entra ID) to create local AWS IAM users, these unmanaged identities sit outside central control and policy enforcement.
Delinea automatically cross-references native cloud identities against centralized directory sources. When an unmanaged local user is found, Delinea maps out its blast radius and provides concrete remediation recommendations.
Vector B: detecting PAM Bypass attacks
Even when proper PAM solutions are in place, users or bad actors may attempt to bypass credential vaulting entirely by utilizing cached, direct credentials to log into target resources.
Delinea’s Threat Center correlates PAM session checkouts against real-world cloud login events to catch these policy violations in real time.
Conclusion: how Resilient Security unifies CIEM, ITDR, and PAM for your business
Deploying a powerful platform like Delinea is only half the equation, the real challenge lies in designing an identity security architecture that seamlessly bridges the gaps between Privileged Access Management (PAM), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), and Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) without creating friction for your engineering teams.
This is where Resilient Security comes in. As a trusted identity security partner, Resilient Security helps enterprise organizations eliminate identity visibility gaps, eradicate shadow access, and achieve true continuous authorization:
- End-to-End Architecture & Implementation: We design and deploy integrated identity control planes that aggregate access rights across hybrid and multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Shadow IT & Bypass Elimination: We help you establish automated workflows that expose unmanaged local accounts (dev-shadow-admin) and flag users bypassing vaulted credential pathways (Jonas De Weerdt).
- Unified Posture Monitoring: We align ITDR alerts with your existing SIEM/SOAR and Incident Response workflows so identity threats are detected and contained before impact occurs.
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