Taking control of IAM in the AI era

CJ Oosthuizen, Google Cloud and Workspace specialist, Argility Technology Group.

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AI – and shadow AI – are proliferating, creating a series of new risks for organisations. To gain control of who and what is accessing corporate data, organisations need unified control planes designed to shed light on the entire environment.

This is according to CJ Oosthuizen, Google Cloud & Workspace Specialist at The Argility Technology Group (ATG), part of the Data and Technology cluster arm of global enterprise, Smollan.

Oosthuizen says many organisations are embracing AI without having the necessary foundational infrastructure and controls in place, while shadow AI is the inevitable result of users seeking innovation when legacy infrastructure cannot accommodate it. “Employees will inevitably bypass IT, but shadow AI creates a massive, high-risk blind spot,” he says.

The risks of rapid adoption without the proper guardrails in place are myriad, including data leakage and data theft.

“It’s crucial to empower IT with a control plane that gives them visibility and control over who and what has access to corporate data,” he says.

He notes: “JumpCloud recognised early on that AI requires a fundamental shift in how security and IT management should be approached. JumpCloud has therefore evolved its unified identity and access management (IAM) platform to serve as the control plane for the AI era, ensuring that organisations can embrace user-led innovation safely.”

The platform addresses the AI infrastructure challenge in several key ways:

• Governing the Silicon Workforce: JumpCloud has extended its unified IAM to treat non-human identities (NHIs) and AI agents with the same rigour as human users. This means enforcing zero trust, scoping access based on the principle of least privilege and ensuring every machine-to-machine interaction is authenticated and auditable.
• Shadow AI discovery: Aiming to give IT teams the tools to turn the lights back on. JumpCloud's platform now actively detects hidden machine identities and unsanctioned AI usage across endpoints, turning a complex shadow AI risk landscape into a single, reliable source of truth.
• AI-powered IT efficiency: JumpCloud isn’t just securing AI – it is also leveraging it to make IT admins vastly more productive. By integrating enterprise-ready AI directly into the platform, JumpCloud has automated high-frequency administrative tasks, generating reliable scripts instantly, and streamlining workflows – all while keeping a human firmly in the loop for final approvals.

Oosthuizen says:“A unified IT foundation is the only way to gain the visibility required to scale AI safely across hybrid, global workforces and the new ‘Silicon Workforce’. By eliminating the silos between device management, cloud directory and identity verification, JumpCloud is fast-tracking AI readiness for organisations, so they can embrace AI more securely.”