Microsoft’s announcement to retire Microsoft Entra Permissions Management (MEPM) marks a shift for organizations that rely on Azure Entra ID as their primary identity provider. For many Fortune 500 companies, MEPM has been a built-in means to identify excessive permissions, enforce least privilege and secure both human and machine identities.
Consider a Fortune 500 financial services company running most identity management on Microsoft Entra ID with workloads spread across Azure, AWS and GCP. Developers often spin up new workloads with temporary permissions yet these are rarely rolled back. Machine identities created for a single migration project might still have full read/write access to production datastores months later, remaining invisible because they’re not tracked in a unified permissions inventory.
With MEPM leaving the scene, complete, vendor-neutral identity visibility is no longer optional. It’s urgent.
The Impact of the Retirement
Microsoft MEPM will officially retire and not be supported as of October 1, 2025. While native Azure IAM capabilities will remain, organizations will lose the cross-cloud, unified visibility that MEPM offers.
| Who’s Impacted | Organizations currently relying on MEPM for CIEM capabilities, particularly those standardizing on Microsoft Entra ID. |
| Who’s Not Impacted | Customers who never used MEPM or already adopted a third-party CIEM solution. |
| Filling the Gap | Defender for Cloud offers some identity security capabilities but doesn’t fully replicate MEPM’s cross-cloud, vendor-neutral visibility and effective permissions calculation. |
Example: A global healthcare provider has been using MEPM to see effective permissions across Azure and to enforce least privilege for employees and automated services. With MEPM gone, they must rely solely on Azure IAM, losing visibility into AWS-based data lakes integrated via trust relationships. This blind spot enables a single overprivileged account to expose millions of patient records.
Why a Vendor-Neutral CIEM Is Essential
Most Fortune 500 companies use Entra ID as their identity provider, but their workloads span multiple clouds. Without a vendor-neutral CIEM, visibility stops at the Azure boundary.
Example: A retail giant uses Azure Entra ID for workforce identity but runs core supply chain apps in AWS. Their AI-based inventory systems rely on machine identities calling APIs across multiple clouds. Without cross-cloud visibility, overprivileged AWS service accounts go undetected, allowing attackers to pivot from AWS into Azure, a tactic increasingly seen in multicloud breaches.
MEPM’s retirement means organizations must adopt a vendor-neutral CIEM to maintain a complete, accurate and continuous picture of permissions across all clouds.
How Cortex Cloud Identity Security Fills the Gap
Cortex Cloud Identity Security, part of the code-to-cloud-to-SOC platform, provides full CIEM functionality across Azure, AWS and GCP.
The solution delivers:
- Effective permissions calculation to cover both human and nonhuman identities
- Cross-cloud visibility to eliminate blind spots, even beyond Entra ID
- Security insights to identify overprivileged accounts and risky trust relationships
- Compliance enforcement to ensure least-privileged access across all identities
- Governance for machine identities to track API keys, service accounts and workloads
By providing a single source of truth for permissions across your entire cloud estate, Cortex Cloud ensures that organizations impacted by MEPM’s retirement can continue to operate securely without losing critical functionality.
Why Choose Cortex Cloud Now
- Proven at scale: Trusted by enterprises worldwide, including those running complex multicloud and hybrid environments.
- Integrated security intelligence: Correlates identity risk with data security (DSPM), cloud posture (CSPM) and AI security (AI-SPM) for context-rich prioritization.
- Future-ready: Provides the governance foundation to secure tomorrow’s cloud ecosystems as identity sprawl grows with AI agents, microservices and third-party integrations.
Take the Next Step
Don’t let MEPM’s retirement leave your cloud environments exposed.
Schedule a demo today to see how Cortex Cloud Identity Security can help you maintain visibility, reduce risk and enforce least privilege across your multicloud identity landscape.