Most security teams cannot confidently answer a simple question: who has access to which cloud resources right now?
Human identities and accounts now span across thousands of services, subscriptions, and SaaS platforms. The result is a vast, decentralized environment riddled with “unknown unknowns” that security teams cannot fully map, and that traditional security controls weren’t designed to address. Attackers count on these identity blind spots.
The CyberArk Cloud Discovery Service addresses this visibility gap by continuously discovering standing cloud access and entitlements and analyzing their risk. Automated, recurring discovery scans for continuous visibility gives teams a living inventory of who exists in their environment, what those identities can access, and where risk is accumulating. Instead of reacting to alerts after an incident, security teams can identify and prioritize risks before they get exploited.
Why obscured visibility is a security risk multiplier
A recent survey reveals that 54% of respondents find unmanaged privileged accounts weekly, with shadow privilege continuing to grow. Meanwhile, 61% of organizations experienced at least one cloud security incident last year. Security teams are facing an avalanche of alerts they can’t effectively triage.
This persistent lack of comprehensive identity and access visibility stems from several factors: the rapid pace of cloud adoption, decentralized provisioning by different teams, shadow IT proliferation, and the sheer complexity of managing identities across multiple cloud platforms. Traditional discovery methods simply can’t keep pace with these evolving industry challenges.
Effective cloud identity security starts with discovery
CyberArk’s Cloud Discovery Service starts with a simple reality: you cannot secure cloud identities you haven’t discovered. The service puts automated discovery at the center of cloud security, helping security operators answer critical questions:
- What cloud accounts and services exist across our environment?
- Which identities have privileged access or possess sensitive permissions?
- Where are our highest-risk exposures that need immediate attention?
The workflow is simple: Map → Assess → Prioritize → Resolve. This progression ensures teams can quickly move from initial discovery to risk mitigation.
The service integrates natively with major cloud service providers. CDS utilizes CyberArk’s Connect Cloud Environments (CCE), a unified connection point across expansive infrastructures. The platform then performs continuous discovery, cataloging identities and permissions without agents or additional infrastructure. Because it’s agentless, deployment takes minutes rather than weeks.
Navigating cloud identity risk at scale
Discovery is the critical first step toward securing the cloud. The Cloud Discovery Service provides comprehensive visibility into discovered identities and their specific access across the environment, including:
- Standing cloud access: A centralized view of all identities currently holding persistent permissions.
- Granular entitlement mapping: Direct visibility into the specific roles and scopes assigned to each user or service account.
Instead of navigating multiple cloud consoles to find “who has access to what,” the platform consolidates this data into a single, unified interface. By surfacing these entitlement details and workspace scopes, security teams gain the transparency needed to manually review and identify excessive permissions. This visibility serves as the essential foundation for migrating over-privileged identities to a secure, on-demand access model.
Real-world cloud identity security use cases
The platform addresses several key personas and scenarios:
- Security architects use the visibility to decide which applications and identities should be onboarded first.
- Compliance teams can rapidly assess their cloud security posture, identify gaps, and demonstrate progress toward regulatory requirements.
- IT leaders obtain executive-level dashboards showing cloud security posture and remediation progress which is critical for board reporting and budget planning.
Integrating cloud identity discovery into your security stack
Cloud Discovery Service doesn’t operate in isolation. The platform integrates with CyberArk’s broader ecosystem, allowing teams to move from discovery to remediation without switching tools or losing context.
This integration enables organizations to move from discovery to remediation without manual handoffs or context switching.
The future of cloud identity
You can look at CyberArk Cloud Discovery Service as a foundational step in strengthening cloud identity visibility and risk management. The roadmap indicates several key directions:
- Full multi-cloud maturity: Expanding established AWS and Azure governance in CDS to include Google Cloud Platform (GCP), providing a unified security posture across the three major cloud providers.
- One-click remediation: Moving away from manual instructions, CDS will allow teams to create a ZSP access policy with a single click to automatically remove standing access.
- Advanced risk detection: CDS will detect deeper risks including admin-level permissions, access to production/sensitive targets, orphaned users, inactive users, and risky users.
The question is no longer whether cloud identity visibility is required, but how quickly it can be achieved. By making comprehensive cloud discovery accessible and automated, organizations can close the visibility gap that puts them at risk.
For more information about CyberArk Cloud Discovery Service and how it fits into your cloud security strategy, visit Secure Access to Modern Infrastructure Solution or contact your CyberArk representative.
Brooke Markham is a senior product marketing manager at CyberArk, a Palo Alto Networks company.
