Every security trend eventually circles back to identity, because identity is how modern systems decide what’s allowed to happen. That’s true in cloud. It’s true in SaaS. It’s true in DevOps. And it’s becoming brutally true in AI.

The twist is that identity isn’t mostly people anymore.

In a typical organisation, the majority of “users” are service accounts, CI runners, integration tokens, Kubernetes workloads, serverless roles, data pipelines, monitoring agents, and now, AI agents. They don’t go on holiday. They don’t answer security awareness quizzes. They also tend to accumulate permissions because it keeps delivery moving.

Attackers love that. A stolen token doesn’t look like malware. An abused role doesn’t trip classic detection. It looks like normal API traffic, performed by a legitimate principal, with privileges you granted.

This is where identity governance stops being a compliance artefact and becomes an operational discipline. The question that matters isn’t “do we have IAM?” Everyone has IAM. The question is whether identities have lifecycle: who owns them, why they exist, how they’re issued, how they expire, and how quickly you can revoke them without breaking production.

Architecturally, the goal is to shrink the blast radius of any single credential. That means short-lived credentials wherever possible, tightly-scoped permissions tied to specific actions and resources, and separation between build identities, deploy identities, and runtime identities. It means being deliberate about where you allow privilege escalation and where you force friction.

The incident response angle is the tell. In cloud-heavy organisations, the fastest containment move is often identity-based: revoke tokens, rotate keys, kill sessions, freeze role changes. If you can’t do those actions quickly, cleanly, and with confidence, you don’t have an identity programme—you have a future outage and a delayed breach response.

Identity keeps “becoming the perimeter” because the industry keeps building systems where identity is the perimeter. Agents just make the point impossible to ignore: once automation has credentials, identity becomes not just the control plane, but the attack plane.