Build agent identity in house if you have few agents, one platform and an engineer who owns it. Buy, or extend a product you already run, when agents span several clouds, tools and teams. In both cases the hard part is inventory and ownership, not the technology.
What are you actually building?
Agent identity has four parts.
- An inventory: which agents exist, who owns each one, and what it is for.
- Credentials: how each agent proves who it is, and how those credentials are issued, rotated and revoked.
- Permissions: what each agent may do, scoped to the task.
- Records: what each agent did, in a form you can search after an incident.
Most failed projects build part two and skip part one. They end up with excellent credential tooling and no list of what is using it.
What can you build on?
You rarely start from nothing. SPIFFE, the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone, is a set of open source standards for securely identifying software systems in dynamic and heterogeneous environments. It gives workloads short lived, verifiable identities, and it suits services more than it suits agents that act for a user, but the ideas carry over.
Your cloud provider's workload identity and your existing identity provider also issue machine credentials. For many teams, the build option is really "configure what we have, plus a registry and a review process."
Which risks should version one address?
OWASP's Non-Human Identities Top 10 lists improper offboarding, secret leakage, overprivileged identities, long lived secrets, reuse of one identity across systems and humans using machine identities among the top risks. OWASP's guidance on Excessive Agency adds that agents get too much functionality, too many permissions and too much autonomy.
A build plan should name which of these it will address in version one. A plan that says "all of them" will take a year and ship none.
When does building make sense?
Build when most of these hold:
- You run fewer than a few dozen agents and they live on one platform.
- Your existing identity provider already issues the credentials you need.
- An engineer can own the registry and the review cycle for the long term.
- Your needs are unusual enough that products will not fit.
The cost to count is not the first build. It is the third year, when the person who wrote it has left and the agents have multiplied.
When does buying make sense?
Buy, or add to a product you already use, when:
- Agents run across several clouds, SaaS tools and developer environments.
- Several teams create agents without asking.
- You need approval workflows, reports and audit records, not only credentials.
- You cannot staff a durable owner.
Be careful with the word "identity" in product descriptions. Some products manage credentials only. Check whether they also keep an inventory with owners, apply policy and record activity.
A middle path
Many teams do both. They keep credentials in the platforms they already trust, and add a layer that tracks which agent holds what access at what level, with policy enforcement in build and release. That treats the registry and the guardrails as the product to buy or build, while credentials stay with existing providers.
Questions that settle it
Ask your team, plainly:
- How many agents exist today, and how sure are we?
- Who will own this in two years?
- Which of the OWASP risks hurts us most?
- What do we need to show an auditor, and in what form?
- What happens to the agents if we change provider?
What to do
- Count agents by walking through repositories, pipelines and SaaS admin pages.
- Choose the four parts you need and rank them.
- List what your identity provider and cloud already give you.
- Write a one page build option and a one page buy option with the same scope.
- Cost both over three years, including the owner's time. Get quotes for the buy case.
- Pilot on ten agents before committing.
Where Safeguard fits
Safeguard's agent identity capability tracks which AI agents hold what access, at what level, and its guardrails and policies enforce limits at build, CI and release. It sits on the application and software delivery side and works alongside your identity provider, which keeps issuing credentials. If you build, it can supply the registry and policy layer. It does not replace workforce identity or endpoint tooling.
Quick check
Is SPIFFE enough for agent identity?
It helps with workload credentials, but it does not give you an owner inventory, approval rules or activity records. Those you need to add.
What should we decide first?
Who owns the inventory. Technology choices matter less than having a named owner for each agent and a person responsible for the list.
Sources
Last reviewed: 18 October 2026.
