How Can We Manage Identity Access for AI Agents?

Do you know who — and what — is on your network? If yes, do you know what "they" are actually doing?

In this case, the "what" and "they" mentioned could be an AI agent or two — or even hundreds.

Identity and access management (IAM) has been a core component of cybersecurity for decades, even as technology has changed. But one major new aspect of this challenge includes predictions that

in certain areas.

THE AGENTIC IAM CHALLENGE

Diving deeper into this huge challenge, VentureBeat recently declared that "

":

"Enterprises are adding AI agents, applications, workloads, and machine identities far faster than they add employees. Many now plan for a non-human population several times larger than their human one, and identity architecture is what decides how far that growth goes.

"Every AI agent needs a verifiable identity, a credential it cannot leak, and a narrow set of permissions before it touches a production system, and the identity and access management (IAM) platforms most enterprises run today weren’t built to issue any of those things to software.

"What’s missing is an agentic equivalent to a human onboarding process, which is what gives an employer confidence in a new hire, says Matt Caulfield, VP of product, identity, at Cisco.