Entitlement Management

Entitlement Management is the structured management of individual permissions, so-called entitlements, over their entire lifecycle – from request and approval through assignment to review and revocation. An entitlement is the smallest unit of an access right granted, such as a group membership, an application role, a license or a specific action such as read, write or administer.

The challenge lies in the volume: in large organizations, tens of thousands of fine-grained permissions can be distributed across many systems. Entitlement management creates transparency about which rights exist, to whom they are assigned for what reason and who approved them. Permissions are frequently bundled into packages or roles, provided with approval workflows and expiry dates, and regularly confirmed via an Access Review.

Entitlement management is a core component of Identity Governance and Administration (IGA). For cloud infrastructures, a separate category has become established with cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), which analyzes the permissions of users, workloads and services on cloud platforms. As part of Identity Security, entitlement management helps to avoid excessive rights and provide compliance evidence.