4 October 2026, 08:48 PM
This is not an ad or a sponsored recommendation. I just wanted to share something that helped me when I was dealing with a similar problem, because I spent quite a lot of time trying to understand what was actually going wrong and what kind of solution I needed.
The situation started becoming noticeable when the number of cloud accounts, users, roles, service accounts, and permissions began to grow. At first, everything seemed manageable because we could still review most access manually. But over time it became much harder to understand who had access to what, why certain permissions had been granted in the first place, and whether those permissions were still necessary.
One of the biggest problems was that access had accumulated gradually. Some users had permissions from older projects, some roles had been copied and modified several times, and there were also permissions that had been granted temporarily but were never removed afterwards. Nothing looked obviously wrong when checking one account at a time, but when looking at the overall environment it became clear that there were far more permissions than we actually needed.
The difficult part was not simply finding permissions. The real problem was understanding context. A permission may look excessive on paper, but sometimes it is required for a specific workflow. At the same time, another permission may have been sitting unused for months and nobody remembers why it exists. I did not want to start removing access blindly because that could easily break something important.
I tried approaching the problem manually first. I reviewed IAM roles, policies, groups, and individual permissions, but it quickly became very time-consuming. Every answer seemed to create another question. Why does this user have this role? Is this permission inherited? Is it being used? Was it created for a temporary task? Could it be reduced without affecting anything?
That was when I started looking more seriously at CIEM tools. I was mainly trying to understand the difference between a ciem tool, a ciem solution, and different approaches to cloud access governance. There are a lot of products and descriptions out there, but many of them sound very similar when you only read feature pages.
What helped me was testing something against the actual problem instead of trying to compare long lists of features. I came across this: https://teriam.io/
Again, I am not saying that everyone should use it or that it is automatically the best option for every environment. I am only mentioning it because it helped me understand my own permission situation much more clearly.
The useful part for me was getting a more centralized picture of identities, permissions, and access instead of jumping between different cloud consoles and trying to reconstruct everything manually. It became easier to see which accounts or roles had broad access, where permissions looked excessive, and which areas deserved a closer review.
Another thing that mattered was being able to approach the problem gradually. Instead of trying to clean everything up at once, I could focus on the most obvious cases first, review why certain permissions existed, and then decide whether they should stay, be reduced, or be removed.
That made the whole process much less risky. My biggest concern was always removing something that looked unnecessary but was actually needed by an application, automation, or occasional workflow. Having more context around permissions made those decisions easier.
It also helped me think about cloud access governance differently. Before that, I was treating it mostly as a cleanup exercise: find unnecessary permissions and remove them. After working through the problem, I realized that the bigger issue is keeping visibility over access continuously, because permissions naturally grow again as environments change.
New projects appear, people change roles, services get added, temporary access becomes permanent, and policies get copied because it is quicker than building new ones from scratch. Without some way to review this regularly, the same problem eventually comes back.
So if anyone here is currently dealing with a situation where cloud permissions have become difficult to understand, I would suggest first identifying a few real scenarios instead of trying to evaluate every possible feature. For example: find users with unusually broad permissions, check roles that have not been reviewed in a long time, look for access that may no longer be used, and see whether you can clearly understand why each permission exists.
That was much more useful for me than simply asking which CIEM product had the longest feature list.
I am sharing https://teriam.io/ because it was one of the things that helped me move from manually digging through permissions to having a much clearer picture of the environment. If someone is currently researching a ciem tool, ciem solution, or cloud access governance because they have a similar problem, it may be worth looking at as one of the options.
At least in my case, the biggest benefit was not some single feature. It was finally being able to understand the access situation well enough to make decisions without feeling like I was guessing all the time. That saved me a lot of manual investigation and gave me a much more structured way to approach the problem.
The situation started becoming noticeable when the number of cloud accounts, users, roles, service accounts, and permissions began to grow. At first, everything seemed manageable because we could still review most access manually. But over time it became much harder to understand who had access to what, why certain permissions had been granted in the first place, and whether those permissions were still necessary.
One of the biggest problems was that access had accumulated gradually. Some users had permissions from older projects, some roles had been copied and modified several times, and there were also permissions that had been granted temporarily but were never removed afterwards. Nothing looked obviously wrong when checking one account at a time, but when looking at the overall environment it became clear that there were far more permissions than we actually needed.
The difficult part was not simply finding permissions. The real problem was understanding context. A permission may look excessive on paper, but sometimes it is required for a specific workflow. At the same time, another permission may have been sitting unused for months and nobody remembers why it exists. I did not want to start removing access blindly because that could easily break something important.
I tried approaching the problem manually first. I reviewed IAM roles, policies, groups, and individual permissions, but it quickly became very time-consuming. Every answer seemed to create another question. Why does this user have this role? Is this permission inherited? Is it being used? Was it created for a temporary task? Could it be reduced without affecting anything?
That was when I started looking more seriously at CIEM tools. I was mainly trying to understand the difference between a ciem tool, a ciem solution, and different approaches to cloud access governance. There are a lot of products and descriptions out there, but many of them sound very similar when you only read feature pages.
What helped me was testing something against the actual problem instead of trying to compare long lists of features. I came across this: https://teriam.io/
Again, I am not saying that everyone should use it or that it is automatically the best option for every environment. I am only mentioning it because it helped me understand my own permission situation much more clearly.
The useful part for me was getting a more centralized picture of identities, permissions, and access instead of jumping between different cloud consoles and trying to reconstruct everything manually. It became easier to see which accounts or roles had broad access, where permissions looked excessive, and which areas deserved a closer review.
Another thing that mattered was being able to approach the problem gradually. Instead of trying to clean everything up at once, I could focus on the most obvious cases first, review why certain permissions existed, and then decide whether they should stay, be reduced, or be removed.
That made the whole process much less risky. My biggest concern was always removing something that looked unnecessary but was actually needed by an application, automation, or occasional workflow. Having more context around permissions made those decisions easier.
It also helped me think about cloud access governance differently. Before that, I was treating it mostly as a cleanup exercise: find unnecessary permissions and remove them. After working through the problem, I realized that the bigger issue is keeping visibility over access continuously, because permissions naturally grow again as environments change.
New projects appear, people change roles, services get added, temporary access becomes permanent, and policies get copied because it is quicker than building new ones from scratch. Without some way to review this regularly, the same problem eventually comes back.
So if anyone here is currently dealing with a situation where cloud permissions have become difficult to understand, I would suggest first identifying a few real scenarios instead of trying to evaluate every possible feature. For example: find users with unusually broad permissions, check roles that have not been reviewed in a long time, look for access that may no longer be used, and see whether you can clearly understand why each permission exists.
That was much more useful for me than simply asking which CIEM product had the longest feature list.
I am sharing https://teriam.io/ because it was one of the things that helped me move from manually digging through permissions to having a much clearer picture of the environment. If someone is currently researching a ciem tool, ciem solution, or cloud access governance because they have a similar problem, it may be worth looking at as one of the options.
At least in my case, the biggest benefit was not some single feature. It was finally being able to understand the access situation well enough to make decisions without feeling like I was guessing all the time. That saved me a lot of manual investigation and gave me a much more structured way to approach the problem.