Live visibility of every identity

Connect each cloud provider's identity, secrets, and workload APIs through read-only roles. Normalise service accounts, cloud roles, OAuth grants, and federated identities into a single graph. Attribute ownership to a human or team and map effective permissions rather than just assigned roles. Continuous sync catches short-lived workloads and ephemeral agents that point-in-time scans miss entirely.

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Native tools only see their own cloud. They miss cross-cloud privilege chains, SaaS-to-cloud OAuth grants, and AI agent activity that crosses boundaries. Behavioural analytics, ownership attribution, and posture scoring are usually thin or absent. Reporting works inside the cloud but not across the estate. For single-cloud organisations they cover basics. For multi-cloud or SaaS-heavy estates they leave structural blind spots.

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Monitor identity creation events across every cloud, IDP, and SaaS app at runtime. Alert on accounts created outside the expected provisioning workflow, especially service accounts and OAuth grants made directly through cloud consoles. Cross-reference against the HR source of truth for human accounts and the approved agent registry for AI agents. Shadow creation always leaves an audit trail if anyone is watching.

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Look for platforms that ingest SaaS entitlements directly, cross-reference users against the HR source of truth, and flag accounts whose owner has left or whose last activity is stale. AI agents and service accounts need a separate orphan check tied to the originating human or workload. A unified identity graph surfaces orphans across SaaS, cloud, and on-prem in one view rather than per-app.

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Pull last-activity timestamps from every connected system and overlay them with permission scope. Identities unused for 30, 60, or 90 days become candidates for revocation, weighted by the privilege they hold. Stale admin accounts and dormant AI agent credentials carry the most risk. Continuous monitoring catches identities that go dormant after the initial cleanup, which is where most teams lose ground.

Use runtime telemetry rather than scheduled scans. Native API integrations and webhook subscriptions stream identity events, permission changes, and access activity as they happen. Build a normalised graph that links the same identity across every system. Runtime visibility matters most for AI agent and NHI activity, which can spin up, act, and disappear between two daily snapshots.

Shadow IT spawns identities outside any governance process: personal SaaS signups using corporate email, OAuth grants to unsanctioned apps, service accounts created for one-off projects and never reviewed, and AI agents connected through individual developer credentials. Each creates a privileged path the security team cannot see, monitor, or revoke. Discovery requires telemetry from email, browsers, IDPs, and SaaS app inventories combined.