Open Access

AI-Driven Governance and Risk Management of Non-Human Identities in Cloud IAM Environments

https://doi.org/10.55640/ijmcsit-v03i09-01

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Faisal Al-Harbi ¹ , Reem Al-Qahtani ¹ ,

⁴ Department of Information Technology, Arabian Institute of Computing and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The rapid adoption of cloud-native applications, Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, edge computing, machine learning services, autonomous workloads, and application-to-application communication has substantially increased the number and complexity of non-human identities (NHIs) operating within modern cloud environments. Unlike conventional human identities, NHIs—including service accounts, workload identities, application credentials, machine identities, API identities, and automated agents—can execute privileged operations continuously and at machine speed. Consequently, conventional identity governance models centered primarily on human authentication and periodic access reviews are insufficient for dynamically changing machine-to-machine interactions. This paper examines an AI-driven governance and risk-management framework for NHIs in Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) environments. The study adopts a conceptual research-and-review methodology based exclusively on the supplied literature and develops a governance model incorporating identity discovery, contextual risk assessment, least-privilege enforcement, behavioral monitoring, lifecycle management, and adaptive policy decisions. The literature indicates that distributed edge-cloud architectures create heterogeneous workloads, decentralized execution points, and dynamic communication patterns that increase the importance of automated governance. Existing work on edge-cloud computing, IoT platforms, accelerated machine-learning workloads, and distributed detection systems demonstrates the operational complexity associated with such environments. The analysis extends these observations to NHI governance and argues that AI can improve continuous identity visibility and risk prioritization, but should operate within explainable, policy-constrained governance boundaries. The resulting framework emphasizes continuous rather than periodic governance and establishes risk-aware controls for the creation, use, privilege escalation, rotation, and retirement of NHIs.

Keywords

Non-Human Identities, Cloud IAM, Artificial Intelligence, Identity Governance

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AI-Driven Governance and Risk Management of Non-Human Identities in Cloud IAM Environments

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