Risky identities continue to plague cloud infrastructures

Cloud identity and access management remains a major security challenge as organizations increasingly depend on complex, often multicloud environments, with 24% maintaining identities across multiple cloud service providers. The report cited finds that an average of 67% of user identities are risky because of excessive permissions, long-unused access, or lack of multifactor authentication, while machine identities account for 97.2% of managed cloud identities and roughly 40% carry risks such as administrative privileges, user-managed keys, or inactivity. As cloud applications rely on interconnected microservices, external tools, and AI agents, identity permissions can grow rapidly and become difficult to govern. The article argues that IAM now functions as the cloud-native security perimeter and recommends continuous behavioral monitoring, automated enforcement, dynamic least-privilege controls, consolidated multicloud management, removal of unused permissions, and temporary or short-lived credentials. It also presents agentic AI as a potential tool for analyzing identity behavior and managing access risks at scale.

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