What should organisations do when agents need access across APIs and cloud services?

Organisations should enforce attestation-backed access, short-lived credentials, and policy checks at each trust boundary. The practical test is whether the agent can reach the next system only while it remains in an approved runtime state. If the answer depends on a stored secret, the governance model is already too permissive.

Why This Matters for Security Teams

When an agent needs access across APIs and cloud services, the risk is not just that it has too much access. The deeper issue is that autonomous software can chain tools, change intent mid-task, and operate faster than static approval workflows can respond. That makes stored secrets, broad RBAC roles, and inherited service accounts especially dangerous. Current guidance from OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 and NIST AI Risk Management Framework points toward runtime controls, not trust based on identity alone.

NHIMG research shows why this matters operationally: in The 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey, 70% of organisations grant AI systems more access than they would give a human employee doing the same job, and 67% still rely heavily on static credentials. That combination is exactly how agentic systems become over-permissioned across SaaS, cloud control planes, and internal APIs. The practical test is whether access is issued for a task, checked at the moment of use, and revoked as soon as the task ends. In practice, many security teams encounter the failure only after an agent has already reused a credential in a system it was never meant to reach.

How It Works in Practice

The safest model is to treat the agent as a workload identity, not as a user. That means the agent proves what it is with a cryptographic identity, then receives only the minimum access needed for the current action. In mature deployments, this usually combines workload identity, attestation, policy evaluation at request time, and CSA MAESTRO agentic AI threat modeling framework concepts with zero standing privilege. The authorisation decision should be context-aware: what tool is being called, from what runtime, for which dataset, and under which human-approved intent.

Operationally, organisations should prefer JIT credential provisioning over long-lived tokens. A task-specific credential can be minted for one API call path, bound to the approved runtime state, and revoked on completion. That is far safer than letting the agent cache a bearer token and reuse it across cloud services. Where possible, use policy-as-code so that every request is evaluated in real time rather than pre-approved by a broad role. Implementations based on SPIFFE, SPIRE, OIDC workload identity, or similar trust anchors are most useful when they are paired with explicit policy boundaries.

• Use attestation to confirm the agent runtime before granting access.
• Issue ephemeral secrets with short TTLs and automatic revocation.
• Authorize by intent and context, not only by job title or service role.
• Log each tool call and each token exchange as separate control events.

This approach aligns with NHIMG guidance in the OWASP NHI Top 10 and the Ultimate Guide to NHIs, especially where multi-cloud access and shared tooling make credential sprawl hard to see. These controls tend to break down when legacy middleware requires static API keys because the agent cannot present workload proof or rotate credentials cleanly.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter access control often increases orchestration overhead, so organisations have to balance security assurance against deployment complexity. That tradeoff is real in hybrid estates, especially when one service supports modern token exchange and another still requires a static secret. Best practice is evolving, but there is no universal standard for every cross-domain agent path yet, so the policy model needs to be explicit about exceptions rather than silently accepting them.

In some environments, an agent may need access through multiple trust boundaries in one workflow, such as querying a SaaS API, writing to object storage, and then triggering a cloud function. In those cases, each boundary should perform its own policy check, rather than inheriting trust from the first successful authentication. The same caution applies when teams use OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 or the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026 as reference points: the control objective is not just identity hygiene, but limiting what the agent can do when its goal changes, its prompt is manipulated, or its runtime is no longer trusted. The strongest design is one where a compromised step cannot silently inherit the permissions needed for the next step.

For highly regulated workloads, the governance bar should be even higher: if the agent can make autonomous changes to production infrastructure, the organisation should verify whether human approval is required per action or per outcome. Guidance suggests that the more autonomous the system, the less acceptable broad standing privilege becomes.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should teams secure non-human identities across cloud and SaaS?
• How should organisations govern access across many APIs in a digital transformation programme?
• How do organisations know whether a remote access tool is aligned with Zero Trust?
• How should security teams handle secrets across multiple cloud-native vaults?