Identity Governance in the Cloud: 4 Ways to Strengthen Security

Read full article here: https://claritysecurity.com/clarity-blog/4-ways-iga-helps-secure-cloud-environment/?source=nhimg

Cloud environments have become the new frontline of cyberattacks. Recent alerts from Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) point to advanced adversaries, including APT29 (Cozy Bear / Midnight Blizzard), shifting focus from traditional endpoints to directly exploiting cloud services. The weak link? Identity.

Most organizations still rely on generic service accounts for automation and system-to-system connections. While convenient, these accounts create a dangerous blind spot: no accountability, no traceability, and broad access rights that attackers can easily exploit. Every leaked key or compromised service account is essentially a skeleton key to the cloud.

The solution lies in robust Identity Governance and Administration (IGA). Done right, IGA provides the visibility, control, and enforcement organizations need to secure their cloud environments against identity-driven threats.

Four Ways IGA Strengthens Cloud Security

• Automated Provisioning & Deprovisioning - Manual account management leaves behind stale, forgotten, or overprivileged identities. Automated provisioning ensures accounts are created with the right entitlements from day one, while automated deprovisioning instantly removes access when no longer needed. This shrinks the attack surface and reduces compliance exposure.

• Centralized Access Management (Single Source of Truth) - Disparate cloud consoles and disconnected identity silos make audits nearly impossible. IGA consolidates everything into a single source of truth. This allows security teams to track service accounts, eliminate duplicates, and enforce consistent access policies across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Regular Access Reviews - Identity sprawl is inevitable without oversight. Periodic access reviews allow teams to validate who has access to what, and why. Continuous reviews surface orphaned accounts, excessive permissions, or toxic role combinations before they become exploitable gaps.
• Real-Time Reporting & Analytics - Cloud attacks move fast. Without real-time visibility, defenders are always reacting too late. IGA tools provide live insights into account activity, anomalies, and policy violations, allowing security teams to respond quickly and decisively.

The Bigger Picture: Cloud + AI + Non-Human Identities

Identity governance is no longer just about people. In modern cloud environments, non-human identities (NHIs), service accounts, workloads, bots, and AI agents, vastly outnumber human users. If left unmanaged, they become the attacker’s easiest entry point.

A strong IGA program ensures NHIs follow the same rules as humans: least privilege, rotation, auditing, and accountability. As AI-driven agents increasingly automate business processes, the line between “identity” and “attack surface” is disappearing. Governance is the only scalable defense.

Final Word for CISOs

Cloud attackers don’t break in, they log in. With APT groups targeting cloud IAM, the weakest identity becomes the quickest path to compromise. By implementing automated provisioning, centralized access control, continuous reviews, and real-time reporting, CISOs can turn identity governance into a proactive defense layer.

Clarity Security put these controls into action with machine learning-driven risk detection, automated remediation, and audit-ready reporting, helping organizations secure their cloud environments before attackers exploit the gaps.