Cloud Identity

Cloud identity refers to the management and control of user, service, and machine identities within cloud environments. As organizations move to cloud-native architectures and adopt distributed systems, identity becomes the new perimeter—determining who or what can access resources and services, and under what conditions.

Effective cloud identity management is essential for securing data, enforcing least privilege access, and enabling compliance across single-cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments.

What is cloud identity?

Cloud identity is the digital representation of users, applications, services, and machines in a cloud environment. It includes attributes such as roles, permissions, credentials, and authentication factors that define what an entity can access and do.

Identity in the cloud goes beyond just users. It also includes:

• Human users (e.g., employees, contractors, third parties)
• Non-human identities (e.g., service accounts, virtual machines, containers)
• Federated users from identity providers (e.g., SSO platforms)
• Temporary or ephemeral identities (e.g., tokens or roles in serverless functions)

Managing these identities securely is critical, as identity-based attacks—like credential theft, privilege escalation, and lateral movement—are among the most common tactics used in cloud breaches.

Why is cloud identity important?

In the cloud, everything is software-defined, and access to every service or resource is governed by identity. This shift places identity at the core of cloud security.

Cloud identity is important because it enables:

• Access control: Who can access what—and under what conditions—is determined by identity and policy.
• Zero trust architecture: Identity is foundational to zero trust, where access is granted based on continuous verification, not implicit trust.
• Least privilege enforcement: Over-permissioned accounts can be minimized by applying identity governance practices.
• Auditability and compliance: Well-managed identities make it easier to trace access, monitor changes, and satisfy audit requirements.

According to recent research, identity-based threats now account for a significant percentage of security breaches, with compromised credentials being one of the primary attack vectors. Additionally, a recent analysis by the Orca Research Pod found that non-human identities (NHIs) are rapidly expanding organizations’ identity attack surface, with NHIs outnumbering their human counterparts by a ratio of 50:1.

Without centralized identity control and governance, cloud environments become difficult to secure and highly susceptible to privilege abuse and misconfigurations.

Key components of cloud identity

A strong cloud identity management strategy includes several foundational elements:

Identity and access management (IAM)

IAM services in cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP provide the core mechanisms for creating identities, assigning roles, and enforcing permissions. These policies define what actions identities can perform on specific cloud resources.

Role-based and attribute-based access control

Role-based access control (RBAC) assigns permissions based on user roles (e.g., developer, admin), while attribute-based access control (ABAC) uses contextual attributes such as user department, location, or device state to enforce policies.

Identity federation and single sign-on (SSO)

SSO and federated identity allow users to access multiple services with a single identity, typically managed by a central identity provider (e.g., Okta, Azure AD, or Google Workspace). This simplifies access management and improves security by centralizing control.

Machine and service identities

NHIs—such as service accounts, containers, and serverless functions—must also be authenticated and authorized. These identities are often targets for attackers because they can carry significant privileges and are harder to track.

Identity lifecycle management

Identity lifecycle management ensures that identities are created, updated, and removed according to business needs. It includes onboarding, access reviews, permission cleanup, and deprovisioning.

Credential and secrets management

Secure storage and rotation of credentials—like API keys, access tokens, and certificates—helps prevent unauthorized access and limits the blast radius of exposed secrets.

Cloud identity challenges

As organizations scale their cloud use, identity management grows increasingly complex. Common challenges include:

• Identity sprawl: Multiple cloud accounts and services lead to fragmented, inconsistent identity practices.
• Excessive permissions: Users and services often have more privileges than needed, increasing the attack surface.
• Lack of visibility: It’s difficult to know which identities exist, what they can access, and whether that access is justified.
• Shadow identities: Non-human identities created by DevOps or automation tools may be unknown to security teams.
• Credential exposure: Poor secrets management practices can lead to leaked credentials or hardcoded secrets in code.

To mitigate these risks, organizations must adopt centralized, automated, and policy-driven identity controls. In cloud environments, this often requires adopting a Cloud Infrastructure Entitlements (CIEM) solution or a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that provides CIEM capabilities.

How Orca Security helps

The Orca Cloud Security Platform provides full coverage of your cloud identities—both human and non-human—across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Kubernetes. With Orca, organizations can leverage advanced CIEM capabilities to:

• Discover and inventory all identities across accounts and providers
• Detect over-permissioned roles, excessive privileges, and toxic identity combinations
• Identify shadow identities and assess access to sensitive data or workloads
• Surface identity-based attack paths and prioritize remediation based on business impact
• Leverage AI-driven capabilities to accelerate risk remediation and IAM policy optimization
• Monitor credential exposure and detect secrets across the application lifecycle

By integrating identity insights with workload, data, and infrastructure context, Orca helps organizations reduce identity-related risk and strengthen their overall cloud security posture.