In today’s world, organizations are racing toward digital transformation, and their ecosystems have become more distributed, cloud-native, and interconnected than ever before. Users, devices, workloads, and data now span multiple clouds, remote locations, partner networks, and edge environments and the traditional perimeter security, built around the idea of “inside is trusted, outside is not,” has broken down.

In this reality of a multi-cloud ecosystem, Identity has become the new perimeter, and Zero Trust has become the strategic security model for modern enterprises. At the core of Zero Trust, IAM becomes the foundational capability that ensures only the “right identities” get the “right access” at the “right time”.

My blog “Identity as the new perimeter” explains why IAM is the heart of modern Zero Trust architectures, especially in multi-cloud contexts, and organizations must build identity-driven security as their core capabilities.

1. Why Traditional Security Broke Down

For decades, security was based on network boundaries. If a user or device could connect to the corporate network, it was assumed to be trustworthy. But in today’s world:

• Users work from anywhere.
• Devices connect from everywhere.
• Applications live across multiple clouds.
• APIs, bots, and machine identities outnumber humans.
• Attackers actively exploit identity gaps, phishing, MFA fatigue, password spraying, and privilege escalation.

The network security perimeter is no longer a meaningful trust anchor, and the identities of users, devices, or workloads pose a significant threat. Henceforth, identity will be the center of attention for most organizations.

2. Why Identity is the New Perimeter

Zero Trust demands that we shift from location-based trust to identity-based trust, and it is the new security control point because Identities are everywhere in the ecosystem. In my opinion, identities are at every layer of the OSI model, and it is important to implement IAM governance and controls to protect.

Every user, service, virtual machine, container, API, and SaaS app requires an identity. Modern environments contain:

• Human identities (employees, partners, customers)
• Machine identities (service accounts, workloads, server-less functions, IoT)

Attackers target identities because compromising one often gives direct access to cloud resources hence, Authentication is now the first “trust decision,” and before granting access, modern systems verify who/what is requesting access, from where, on which device, with what security context, and under what risk level.

Access is dynamic, not static, so permissions change based on risk scores, user behavior, device posture, and real-time context.

Only IAM can orchestrate these real-time decisions consistently across multiple clouds.

3. Why Zero Trust Starts with IAM

Zero Trust principles are often summarized as “Never trust, always verify” and “Assume breach.” To execute this philosophy at scale, IAM becomes the central enforcement point for strong, continuous authentication. Zero Trust requires passwordless authentication, adaptive MFA, continuous authentication and re-authentication, and risk-based access decisions, and IAM enable these capabilities end-to-end for the organization.

• The basic of the Zero Trust journey starts with Least-Privilege Access (LPA) and it demands granular access controls such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), Policy-based access (PBAC), Just-In-Time (JIT) access, and Privileged Access Management (PAM). The modern IAM systems define and enforce these policies across multi-cloud environments.
• Zero Trust provides visibility and policy consistency, and without IAM, each cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP) has its own identity model, but enterprises need central governance, cross-cloud visibility, and unified identity policies. IAM becomes the single authority for controlling who has access, what they can access, why they have access, how they got access, and when they use access.
• Identity threat detection is primarily focused on Zero Trust, and it is incomplete without real-time detection of identity anomalies for suspicious logins, MFA bypass attempts, Impossible travel, Privilege escalation, and Lateral movement

4. The Multi-Cloud Challenge

Most enterprises today are either multi-cloud by design or by accident. Each cloud has its own tools for identity, security, and authorization. This creates challenges for Inconsistent identity models, such as AWS IAM ≠ Azure AD ≠ GCP IAM, and managing identity separately in each cloud creates administrative overheads, IAM operations in silos, duplication, policy drift, misconfigured privileges, and increased attack surface.

A centralized IAM solution and strategy solves the identities across multi-cloud environments, including Micro-services, Kubernetes pods, API gateways, Server-less functions, and DevOps pipelines etc.

All require secure identity lifecycle management, automate onboarding, secrets rotation, and certificates, as well as cross-cloud access governance, and organizations need a unified view of all entitlements, permissions, role mappings, and identity risks.

Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) play a major role in centralized policy enforcement, and IAM ensures policies such as MFA everywhere, Step-up authentication, Conditional access, Least privilege, and Access certification are consistently applied across clouds.

5. IAM Capabilities Required for Zero Trust in Multi-Cloud and operationalise Zero Trust organizations need an IAM ecosystem that includes:

• Unified identity provider (IdP): SAML, OIDC, OAuth federation across all apps.
• MFA / Passwordless: adaptive, phishing-resistant authentication.
• Conditional Access + Risk Engine: real-time risk scoring, behavioral analytics.
• Identity Governance (IGA): certification, role management, access workflows.
• Privileged Access Management (PAM): JIT elevation, session monitoring, vaulting.
• CIEM: cloud entitlements visibility and least privilege automation.
• Identity Threat Detection: continuous monitoring and anomaly response.
• Strong machine identity management: secrets, certificates, workload identity federation.

IAM is not a single tool. It’s an integrated capability. And that’s why IAM is the Anchor of Zero Trust, and ultimately, all Zero Trust pillars, such as user, device, network, application, and data security, depend on identity to function, and no request should be trusted without:

• Valid identity
• Strong authentication
• Risk evaluation
• Policy evaluation
• Least privilege enforcement
• Continuous monitoring

6. Conclusion

Zero Trust starts with Identity because it does everything and in a real world where the only consistent security control is Identity:

• Data lives everywhere
• Apps run everywhere
• Users connect from anywhere
• Attackers exploit identity gaps

Zero Trust succeeds or fails based on the strength, maturity, and integration of IAM. That is why IAM is no longer just an institutional function but it is a strategic business capability and the foundation of modern security architecture.