Guardian Agents: The Next Layer of Identity Governance

This article explains how production-grade agentic AI creates an identity governance gap by inheriting and exercising overprivileged human and service permissions across clouds and SaaS, and argues for a dedicated "guardian agent" control layer that provides continuous discovery, behavioral baselining, runtime least-privilege enforcement, and integration with existing IAM/IGA/PAM tooling to mitigate risks such as prompt injection, stale credentials, and cross-system lateral movement.