Cloud Security · 5 min
Cloud Identity & Least Privilege
Humans, workloads, and the permissions between them
This lesson explains the concept, then checks your understanding in a short interactive exercise.
Two kinds of identity
Cloud platforms authenticate people and software with different mechanisms and different failure modes.
- Human identities — staff and contractors, protected by MFA and sign-in controls
- Workload identities — services, pipelines and functions, authenticated by keys, tokens or platform-issued credentials
Roles and least privilege
Permissions are usually granted through roles rather than to individuals. Least privilege means each identity holds the access its job genuinely needs — not zero access, and not everything just in case.
- Grant what the task requires
- Separate production from development
- Review and remove access that stopped being used
- Elevate temporarily for rare, high-impact actions
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