Lacework’s new CIEM uses ML to fish out high-risk identities

Cloud security provider Lacework has released a new cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) offering to strengthen the observability of all cloud identities.

The new capability is aimed at simplifying Lacework’s cloud security offering by merging with its existing cloud security posture management (CSPM), attack path analysis, and threat detection capabilities into a single platform.  

“CIEM enriches our platform with cloud identity and entitlement configuration data, along with the understanding of how identities and entitlements are used,” said Adam Leftik, vice president of products at Lacework. “This not only solves critical customer challenges today but provides future opportunities to combine this data with capabilities like attack path analysis, anomaly detection and composite alerts, and more, to help customers even further.”

The new CIEM capabilities are available at launch as part of Lacework’s pro package and can be accessed for no added cost. The company offers tiered packages including standard, pro, and enterprise based on a customer’s security needs.

ML to help identify high-risk identities

Lacework’s patented machine learning technology, Polygraph Data Platform, will power the new entitlement management offering. This capability, the company claims, will help dynamically discover and analyze cloud user, resource, group, and role identities, as well as their corresponding permissions.

This is done by automatically comparing the permissions granted to the identities with the permissions actually utilized, allowing identification of identities that have been assigned excessive privileges.

Consequently, it computes a risk score for every identity, assesses the identities with the highest risk using attack path analysis, and generates recommendations to optimize permissions based on historical data.

“Identity risks, attacks, and incidents continue to be a foundational threat vector across data, apps, cloud, and on-premises,” said Michael Sampson, an analyst at Osterman Research. “Any organization using cloud infrastructure must have an appropriate handle on their identity posture, and the capabilities added by Lacework will be highly valuable to its customers.”

The new entitlement management capability, combined with the existing attack path context and anomaly detection capabilities, is expected to help customers with IAM compliance, prioritizing high-risk identities, least-privilege enforcement, and detecting and managing lateral movement, privilege escalation, and insider threats. 

Entitlement management to round out cloud security

The new offering is aimed at complementing Lacework’s existing capabilities to deliver a unified cloud security offering through a single platform.

“Lacework CIEM provides added value for customers when complementing existing Lacework feature sets to provide a unified cloud security experience. A major focus for Lacework is providing a unified data model, which allows us to better understand customer environments and provide deeper security insights so that teams can quickly and collaboratively detect, investigate, and respond to cloud risks and threats,” Leftik said.

Lacework’s existing capabilities include a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), CSPM, infrastructure as code (IaC) security, cloud workload protection platform (CWPP), Kubernetes security, and attack path analysis.

“Cloud security tools are spread across a plethora of specialized sub-segments, which were separately classified to provide comparability between emergent vendors and call out specific capabilities,” Sampson said. “While each is valuable or essential, organizations operating multiple disparate tools from disparate vendors struggle to make sense of their attack surface.”

Although vendors are happy to dominate one of the many specific smaller segments in cloud security, over time organizations value fewer tools from fewer vendors, he added.