CSPM and CIEM tools excel at showing you every cloud security risk, but like getting an X-ray without a doctor, they leave you staring at problems without the power to actually fix them.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) tools are great at one thing: showing you what’s broken. They scan, report, highlight risks, and send alerts. They draw attention to misconfigurations, excessive permissions, and deviations from best practices. In other words, they’re observability engines.
But observability is not remediation.
If you’ve ever gotten an X-ray, you know the machine doesn’t tell you what to do about the problem. It just exposes the issue. What you really need is a doctor; someone who understands the bigger picture, can interpret the findings, and can take action to fix what’s wrong. That’s where these tools stop short.
Most enterprise security and cloud teams aren’t suffering from lack of visibility. They’re suffering from too much visibility with too little insight. Dashboards are full of red flags and risk scores. Reports confirm what everyone already suspects: there are over-permissioned identities, inconsistent policies, and growing technical debt in cloud access.
The problem isn’t figuring out where the pain is. It’s knowing what to do about it and doing it in a way that scales.
CSPM tools identify misconfigurations. CIEM tools reveal who has too much access. But neither of them fundamentally change the access model. Neither reduce standing privilege. Neither enforce policy at runtime. They leave remediation as someone else’s problem.
And in practice, that means:
Teams manually triaging alerts that will resurface next quarter
Developers overprovisioning because it’s faster than requesting access the right way
Security teams watching the same issues come back again and again, just in a different form
These tools are useful for diagnostics, but they don’t prescribe treatment, and they certainly don’t administer care.
To actually improve cloud security posture, organizations need more than visibility. They need enforcement. They need automation. They need access controls that reflect intent and respond to context, without requiring a ticket, a spreadsheet, or a quarterly review cycle.
That’s what SGNL brings to the table.
We don’t just highlight where your IAM architecture is failing. We make it possible to replace static entitlements with policy-based, just-in-time access. Instead of flagging that a user has too much access, we ensure that access doesn’t exist until it’s needed, and disappears as soon as it isn’t.
Observability tools will continue to play an important role. But the future of identity security in the cloud won’t be defined by better alerts. It will be defined by who can take action, in real time, and at scale.
If your X-ray is lighting up with every cloud risk imaginable, maybe it’s time to stop reading diagnostic printouts and start working with a specialist.
SGNL is here to help. We give you the policy engine, enforcement layer, and runtime decision-making you need to actually fix what’s broken.
Want to move from red flags to real change? Talk to us.
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