How identity management is shifting into the agent era

We’re witnessing a shift in enterprise architecture: AI agents are moving from supporting roles to autonomous actors that drive decisions, trigger transactions, and interact directly with APIs — often on behalf of users. As a result, identity management is evolving.

Identity isn’t just for humans anymore — it’s becoming the security backbone for intelligent, non-human agents operating at scale.

What’s Driving the Shift?

Traditional IAM was built around people: long-lived users with logins, passwords, and access roles. But Agentic AI requires a different approach — one built for dynamic, autonomous, ephemeral actors that operate across systems and clouds.

Agentic AI is:

• Autonomous: Makes decisions and takes action without human prompts.
• Delegated: Operates on behalf of a user or service.
• Distributed: Runs in multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

This means the core identity functions — authentication, access control, authorization, audit, and governance — must all adapt.

How Identity Management Works in the Agent Era

Let’s break down how identity must evolve across the key functions to support secure, scalable AI agent architectures.

Agent Authentication: Verifying Digital Actors in Real Time

Human users log in with passwords, biometrics, or passkeys.
Agents authenticate through cryptographic proofs.

Agentic authentication uses:

• SPIFFE/SVID: Secure identities for workloads via signed X.509 certs.
• PKCE: For OAuth flows without secret sharing.
• mTLS + JWT tokens: For verifiable session binding.

Agents don’t log in. They present short-lived credentials bound to specific identities, tasks, and lifespans.

Access Control: Enforcing Runtime Guardrails for Agents

RBAC and ABAC aren’t enough when an agent can change tasks every second.

Modern agent access control uses:

• Scoped, time-bound tokens
• Dynamic ABAC policies (task + user intent + risk)
• Policy-as-code engines (OPA, Cedar)

These controls are enforced at the proxy or API layer, ideally via something like Strata’s App Fabric or an MCP-aware API gateway.

Authorization: Delegation and On-Behalf-Of Workflows

Many agents act on behalf of users.
This requires:

• OAuth On-Behalf-Of (OBO) support
• Delegation tracking from user → agent → downstream service
• Signed claims asserting role, intent, and task scope

This makes it possible to trace and trust the full execution chain.

Auditing: Visibility into Agent Behavior and Decision Chains

Logging an API call isn’t enough when agents are autonomous.

Agent observability includes:

• Execution graphs that trace multi-agent workflows
• Signed attestations for critical actions
• Context-rich telemetry (e.g., what data was accessed, by which agent, on whose behalf)

These logs feed into SIEM systems and support real-time compliance validation.

Administration & Lifecycle Governance: Just-in-Time, Policy-Driven Identity

Instead of manual provisioning, agent identity must be:

• Ephemeral and JIT-issued
• Scoped with TTL
• Managed via CI/CD pipelines

Agent registries track:

• Agent metadata
• Assigned scopes and policies
• Lifecycle events and revocations

This prevents identity sprawl and ensures only active agents have active credentials.

How This Compares to Human IAM

Why This Matters Now

Agents are growing exponentially:

• 80x more agents than humans in enterprise systems (projected)
• Accessing production APIs, financial systems, cloud infrastructure
• Often operating without centralized identity or audit controls

Without a new identity architecture, organizations will face:

• Credential sprawl and agent over-permissioning
• Untraceable decisions and broken accountability
• Regulatory exposure from invisible machine actions

The Future of Identity Is Runtime-Driven and Agent-Aware

Identity is no longer just about who logged in — it’s about who (or what) is making a decision in real time.

Agentic identity infrastructure — powered by Identity Fabrics, Agent Registries, and Orchestration Layers — makes it possible to:

• Trust agents at runtime
• Secure access dynamically
• Audit actions end-to-end

Platforms like Strata’s Maverics provide this foundation — extending Zero Trust into the age of Agentic AI.

Want to explore how Maverics secures AI agents across clouds and runtimes?
Join our Early Access Program and see what identity looks like in the agentic future.