Continuous Identity Governance and Automated Threat Protection for Non-Human Identities in Multi-Cloud IAM

The rapid adoption of cloud-native applications, distributed services, automated pipelines, containers, workload orchestration, and machine-to-machine communication has resulted in a substantial expansion of non-human identities (NHIs) within enterprise environments. Unlike conventional human identities, NHIs frequently operate continuously, interact programmatically, and require access across multiple cloud platforms, creating governance and security challenges that cannot be adequately addressed through static access-control practices. This research develops a conceptual framework for continuous identity governance and automated threat protection for NHIs in multi-cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM). The proposed approach combines identity discovery, contextual authorization, behavioral monitoring, graph-oriented relationship analysis, risk evaluation, adaptive policy enforcement, and automated remediation. The methodology synthesizes the computational principles evident in the provided literature, particularly distributed graph processing, parallel computation, clustering, data mining, and scalable analytics, and applies them conceptually to NHI governance. The analysis indicates that graph-based identity representations can improve visibility into relationships among workloads, credentials, resources, and permissions, while distributed processing can support continuous analysis at multi-cloud scale. The study further argues that automated governance should be risk-adaptive rather than exclusively rule-based, allowing access privileges and protective controls to respond dynamically to changing identity behavior. The proposed framework contributes a research-oriented foundation for continuous NHI governance while recognizing limitations related to heterogeneous cloud environments, behavioral baselines, false positives, policy conflicts, and computational overhead.

Non-Human Identities, Multi-Cloud IAM, Continuous Identity Governance, Automated Threat Protection

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Ganapathy, S. K. (2025). Automated Governance and Protection of Non-Human Identities in Cloud IAM. Frontiers in Emerging Computer Science and Information Technology, 2(02), 08–20. Retrieved from https://irjernet.com/index.php/fecsit/article/view/cloud-iam-non-human-identities.