AI-driven identity security reshapes enterprise defenses amid rising non-human risks

As organisations integrate an expanding ecosystem of non-human identities, including AI agents, new security frameworks like ISPM are emerging to manage risks, automate governance, and secure the evolving digital perimeter against sophisticated threats.

Modern enterprises are witnessing a profound transformation in their workforce composition, which now extends beyond human employees to encompass a vast array of non-human identities (NHIs). These include service accounts, APIs, bots, and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) agents. These NHIs frequently hold broad and autonomous access privileges that span across on-premises infrastructures as well as cloud environments, creating a sprawling identity ecosystem that traditional human-centric security tools struggle to manage effectively.

The volume and velocity of these identities are growing at a pace that outstrips the capacity of IT teams to secure them manually. Organizations can find themselves administering millions of entitlements, necessitating continuous and dynamic review processes to prevent risks such as access creep, where privileges accumulate unchecked, leading to potential exposure of sensitive data or system breaches. Orphaned or inactive identities further exacerbate the risk landscape by lingering as unmonitored access points exploitable by attackers.

AI presents a dual-edged sword in this evolving identity security environment. On one hand, AI-driven tools enhance governance by automating critical identity management functions, from user provisioning and entitlement reviews to policy enforcement, with greater efficiency and precision. Natural language interfaces simplify user interactions for permission requests, while agentic AI accelerates the onboarding of new applications and services, historically a challenging process. AI can also detect behavioural anomalies by correlating access patterns across multiple systems, thereby providing deeper context and timely alerts when AI agents or other NHIs act outside expected workflows, such as accessing sensitive financial data unexpectedly.

On the other hand, AI agents themselves introduce unique security challenges. Unlike traditional machine identities, AI agents operate with a degree of autonomy and decision-making that resembles human behaviour. This autonomy allows compromised AI agents to act with malicious intent, exfiltrating data or moving laterally within networks, posing high-impact threats. Despite these risks, many organisations currently fail to distinguish AI agents from standard NHIs, leaving security teams inadequately equipped to manage their specific threat profiles.

To address these challenges, a new paradigm of identity security is essential, one that leverages AI not only to secure identities but to manage and mitigate AI-related risks effectively. The Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) framework, exemplified by platforms such as Saviynt, incorporates four foundational pillars: identity data hygiene, governance control effectiveness, derived and inherited identity risk, and AI-powered security. This approach enables comprehensive discovery and monitoring of all identity types, human, NHIs, and AI components, across diverse environments including on-premises, SaaS, and cloud. By mapping relationships between identities, systems, and entitlements, security teams gain holistic visibility into access privileges and behavioural context, facilitating precise risk assessment through identity posture scoring and streamlined accountability via ownership workflows.

Pre-built guardrails enforce principles such as least-privilege access, thus mitigating risks associated with misconfiguration and rapidly evolving identity interactions. Importantly, distinguishing between static and agentic NHIs allows for tailored controls that reflect each identity’s autonomy and operational risk, enabling faster, machine-speed responses to emerging threats. Such AI-powered security frameworks are pivotal in securing the new identity perimeter, where human and non-human actors coexist in increasingly complex ecosystems.

As enterprises continue to embrace digital transformation and AI-driven operations, evolving identity governance becomes critical to maintaining robust security postures. Leveraging AI for and against AI agents represents both a necessary adaptation and a strategic advantage in safeguarding sensitive data and systems from emerging, sophisticated threats.

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Source: Fuse Wire