2026 Planning / 2026 Essentials
Your Scripts and AI Integrations Need Identities Too
Manage application identities as deliberately as employee accounts.
A workload identity represents software such as an application, script, service, or container. Integrations need these identities to authenticate and access resources. As automation grows, forgotten service principals and shared credentials can become difficult to track unless ownership and access are explicit.
What matters
- Inventory application identities and connect each one to a workload and business owner.
- Prefer managed identity or federation where suitable instead of distributing long-lived secrets.
- Review permissions and remove identities when integrations are retired.
Practical example: A scheduled reporting job uses its own narrowly scoped workload identity rather than an employee’s personal administrator account.
One action today: Find one integration identity and document its owner, permissions, and authentication method.