AI agents are part of your team now. Here’s how to secure all of them.

Presented by JumpCloud

A practical framework for securing every identity in the modern workforce, human or not.

Your organization already has a rigorous process for governing human identities. New employees go through onboarding. They get a role, a set of entitlements, and a named manager accountable for their access. When they leave, their credentials are revoked and access is terminated. It’s a well known IT process: every workforce identity that can access your systems needs to be known, scoped, and accountable from the moment they enter your world, to the moment they are off-boarded.

AI agents are now operating inside those same systems. They access Salesforce, create tickets in Jira, provision infrastructure, process financial transactions, and communicate on behalf of your teams. In every meaningful sense they are members of your workforce, except that in most organizations they were never onboarded, have no named owner, and have no offboarding process when their purpose expires.

JumpCloud’s Q3 2026 research found that non-human identities now outnumber human users in 83% of organizations, and only 21% have implemented governance controls specifically for them. The framework below is designed to close that gap.

Stage 1: Discover every agent operating in your environment

Governance starts with an accurate inventory, and most organizations are working with an incomplete one. AI agents are being deployed by product teams, operations leaders, and individual contributors who have both the tools and the motivation to move fast. IT inherits the governance responsibility after the fact, often without knowing the full scope of what has been deployed.

Shadow AI is the practical consequence: agents operating across production environments with no formal record, no defined owner, and no systematic way to stop them if something goes wrong. Discovering your agent population is an ongoing practice, not a one-time audit. Build an inventory across every environment where agents could be running: cloud platforms, managed devices, SaaS integrations, and on-premise systems. For each agent, document what it can access, what workflows it influences, and what triggers its actions. That inventory is the foundation everything else in this framework depends on.

Stage 2: Register every agent as a formal identity with a named owner

Every agent that operates in your environment should exist as a formal identity in your directory, with the same basic attributes you assign to any employee: a defined purpose, a scope of authorized action, and a named human owner who is accountable for its behavior.

This is the architectural decision that separates organizations that can govern their agents from those that cannot. Agents registered as proper identities can be assigned entitlements, subjected to conditional access policies, and included in access reviews. Agents that exist only as service account workarounds or API keys in environment variables are ungovernable by any systematic means.

Registration is also the mechanism for addressing Zombie Agents: agents that outlived their original purpose but kept running, kept accessing systems, and kept accumulating permissions. When every agent has a named owner responsible for its renewal, agents without active ownership naturally lose their access when that ownership lapses. The offboarding happens as a consequence of process rather than as a reactive cleanup after something breaks.

Stage 3: Manage agent access with least privilege and zero standing credentials

Registered agents need access to do their jobs. The governing principle for that access is least privilege: each agent should have entitlements scoped precisely to what its defined purpose requires, with access that is time-bounded wherever possible and revocable immediately if the agent’s behavior changes.

Standing credentials in environment variables are a persistent liability. Static API keys that never rotate are a persistent liability. In practice, managing agent access securely means issuing just-in-time credentials for privileged operations, building approval workflows that require human sign-off before agents reach sensitive systems, and maintaining emergency shutdown mechanisms that work at the speed the situation requires.

For agents that need access to privileged web applications, SSH servers, or databases, credential shielding is an additional requirement: the agent should be able to complete its task without the underlying credentials ever being exposed to the model running it. Every privileged session should be recorded and available for audit.

Stage 4: Govern agent behavior continuously, not just at deployment

The first three stages establish the controls. Governance is what keeps them current. It is the ongoing practice of verifying that what agents are actually doing matches what they are authorized to do, and course-correcting when those diverge.

Every agent action should be logged. Access reviews should happen on a regular cadence, evaluating whether each agent’s entitlements remain appropriate for its current purpose. When an agent’s behavior deviates from its defined scope, the anomaly should be detectable before it becomes an incident. When an agent’s purpose ends, access revocation should be a procedural step, not a reactive measure triggered by something going wrong.

Governance also means maintaining the audit trail needed to answer accountability questions: what did this agent access, what actions did it take, who authorized it, and what was the outcome? Organizations that cannot reconstruct that chain for any given agent are not governing their agents in any meaningful sense. They have deployed them and hoped for the best.

The foundation underneath all four stages

Each stage of this framework becomes significantly harder to execute when the underlying IT environment is fragmented. Identity, access, device management, and security controls spread across disconnected systems create the gaps where agent governance falls through, and organizations end up applying different policies in different places rather than consistent governance everywhere.

JumpCloud’s research found that organizations operating in fully unified IT environments are five times more likely to deploy agents in business-critical workflows than those running fragmented stacks. Whether the control layer is coherent enough to apply consistent policies across humans, devices, and agents simultaneously is what determines whether governance scales with AI adoption or lags behind it.

This is the core premise of Agentic IAM: that governing humans, devices, and agents through a single coherent control layer is what makes the framework above executable at scale rather than aspirational.

Securing every identity, human or not, is the operational foundation that makes AI safe to scale. Organizations that build it now will not just reduce risk. They will expand AI into more workflows, move faster, and do it with the confidence that comes from knowing every identity in their environment is known, governed, and accountable.

JumpCloud’s Q3 2026 IT Trends Research report (n=800 IT leaders, US + UK) is available here. The Agentic IAM lifecycle framework referenced in this article was developed by JumpCloud and is available here.

Greg Keller is CTO and Co-founder at JumpCloud.

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