In a nutshell: IAM must evolve from pure login management to comprehensive management of human and non-human identities in distributed, SaaS- and AI-driven environments.
Identity and Access Management is no longer limited to classic login processes for internal systems. AI agents, SaaS applications, and distributed IT environments are expanding the attack surface and calling established IAM concepts into question.
Classic IAM was long designed to manage human user identities and their access rights to central enterprise systems. With the proliferation of SaaS applications, cloud services, and increasingly autonomous AI systems, a significantly more complex identity landscape is emerging. In addition to human users, machine identities, service accounts, and AI agents that access systems and data independently now also need to be managed.
For CISOs, this development means that classic control mechanisms such as central directory services and one-time authentication are no longer sufficient to reflect the actual access reality. Distributed environments make it harder to maintain an overview of which identity accesses which resource and at what time. Misconfigurations, over-privileged accounts, and unused but still active permissions are among the risks that are harder to detect in such heterogeneous environments.
AI agents require particular attention, as they are often equipped with far-reaching permissions to perform tasks automatically, yet their behavior is not always fully predictable. Without clear governance structures for such non-human identities, the risk increases that access rights get out of control or can be abused for attacks.
For security leadership in enterprises, this creates the need to revise IAM strategies and extend them to all identity types, including continuous review of permissions and consistent implementation of the principle of least privilege, also for automated systems.
Source: www.computerweekly.com · Published August 3, 2026
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