AI agents are quickly moving from experimentation into production systems where they retrieve data, make decisions and perform actions on behalf of users and applications. While much of the conversation has focused on prompt injection and model safety, the bigger operational challenge is often much simpler:
What should an agent actually be allowed to do?
This guide explores how organizations can prepare for agentic systems by treating identity and authorization as foundational security controls rather than afterthoughts. It explains why governing an agent requires understanding the full action chain, including the user, service account, tool, workload and target resource involved in every request.
You’ll learn why standing privilege creates unnecessary risk for autonomous systems, how runtime authorization enables safer agent behavior and what security teams should consider before deploying agents into production environments. The guide also discusses identity discovery, policy enforcement and practical governance strategies that allow organizations to adopt AI without giving agents broad or permanent access.
As AI becomes another operating identity inside the enterprise, securing what agents can do becomes just as important as understanding what they can generate.
