Layer 3 · Agent Management
Microsoft Agent 365 — the command center for every agent, whoever built it and wherever it runs
Platform · IDENTIFY — every agent owned & managed Owned by IAM & security
Table of Contents
- Positioning: the agent command center
- Why agents need their own identity class
- The compounding surface: SaaS, endpoint, cloud
- Observe · Govern · Secure
- Observe — see the whole estate
- Govern — guardrails and lifecycle
- Secure — identity, access, data, threats
- Entra Agent ID: the identity model
- Blueprints and policy templates
- Heterogeneous by design: any agent, any builder
- The connective tissue: linking traffic to an agent
- Regulatory alignment and audit
- Prerequisites and dependencies
- Integration with the other layers
- Ownership & outcomes
- Activation
Positioning: the agent command center
Layer 3 is where an agent stops being anonymous software and becomes a managed enterprise asset. Microsoft Agent 365 is the control plane for agents — and the critical word is heterogeneous.
Agent 365 is not the control plane for Microsoft agents. It is the control plane for every agent.
| Agent type | How it lands in Agent 365 |
|---|---|
| SaaS — Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio | Native — automatic identity and registry entry |
| Managed runtime — Microsoft Foundry Agent Service | Native — identity per project and per published agent |
| Platform / BYO — your framework on AKS, ACA, Agent Framework | Register via workload identity + the Agent 365 SDK |
| Third-party & on-prem — partner and non-Microsoft runtimes | Federate via the Agent 365 SDK; a broad partner ecosystem already integrates with it |
One registry. One identity model. One policy surface. One audit trail.
Important
Identity is the connective tissue of the entire Citadel Blueprint. Once an agent is in Agent 365, Layer 4 security and governance apply to it automatically — Defender posture and threat protection, Purview data governance and audit, Entra access control. Get identity right and the security layer comes along almost for free. This is the highest-leverage step in the whole blueprint, and the most under-scoped in most customer conversations.
The governing principle
The best way to manage agents is to extend the infrastructure you already use for managing users.
Same Entra. Same Purview. Same Defender. Same admin center. Agents simply become another identity type. That is what keeps security consistent and reduces blind spots as agent numbers grow — and it is why the team that owns user identity today is the natural owner of agent identity tomorrow.
Why agents need their own identity class
Agents belong in the same identity conversation as users, apps, and devices, because they take actions and access resources. But they do not fit neatly into the old buckets:
- Sometimes an agent acts on behalf of a user.
- Sometimes it behaves more like an application.
- Unlike traditional apps, agents are not static — they can acquire new skills as model capabilities evolve, which changes what they are able to do over time.
That is exactly why an agent needs to be treated as a first-class identity. When it has one, you can answer the questions that actually matter:
Who is it? What can it access? What did it do? And can I revoke it?
Without an identity, those answers get fuzzy fast. You cannot separate human actions from agent actions, apply consistent controls, or respond quickly when something changes. If an agent is compromised, it operates at speed and scale — identity is how you get attribution, enforce protections consistently, and investigate quickly.
Three agent interaction patterns
As agent roles change, so should permissions. The identity model supports three:
| Pattern | Behavior | Permission model |
|---|---|---|
| Interactive agents — "Assist me" | Acts on demand by user prompting, or on behalf of a user | Uses delegated user permissions; needs no access rights of its own. Ideal for summarizing email or responding to queries. |
| Autonomous agents — "Do it for me" | Acts on behalf of itself, or coordinates actions on the user's behalf and schedule | Has its own roles and permissions, enabling complex goal-oriented work independently — monitoring logs, auditing activity. |
| Digital colleagues — "Work with others" | Collaborates with agents, tools, and people; provisions its own access; achieves goals on its own behalf and schedule | Fully provisioned with user-like credentials — can join Teams, create and edit documents, interact in conversations, and collaborate with other agents via the registry. |
All three are governed, auditable, and discoverable through a standards-based registry.
The compounding surface: SaaS, endpoint, cloud
Agent sprawl is not a single problem — it compounds across three distinct surfaces, each with its own risk profile.
| Surface | The questions it raises |
|---|---|
| ☁️ SaaS agents | What agents are employees using via the internet? What are their risk levels? What information is being shared with them? (This is the next evolution of shadow IT — without visibility, every interaction is a potential data leak.) |
| 💻 Endpoint agents | What agents do employees have installed on their devices? What guardrails are built into them? What access and permissions are employees granting? (An over-permissioned agent on an endpoint is a new attack vector sitting right on the device.) |
| 🏗️ Cloud agents | What agents are being developed across cloud and AI platforms? What vulnerabilities could be exploited? What built-in guardrails does the platform provide? (These have the deepest integrations — APIs, MCP servers, data stores, other agents.) |
These three surfaces don't just add risk — they multiply it. A SaaS agent an employee grants access to can reach endpoint data. A cloud agent can invoke tools that touch SaaS and endpoint resources. The sprawl compounds because agents interact across boundaries in ways traditional security models were never designed for.
Every interaction surface needs protection
| Interaction | What must be protected |
|---|---|
| H2A — human to agent (prompt) | Protect prompts; govern which users can access which agents; prevent users compromising agents |
| A2H — agent to human (response) | Screen responses; apply labels and DLP to what comes back |
| A2A — agent to agent (invocation) | Guardrails on which agents may interact; protect A2A connections; prevent agents oversharing data between them |
| A2LLM — agent to model (inference) | Prevent agents becoming a vehicle for model poisoning |
| A2App — agent to tools/APIs (invocation) | Access governance, real-time protection, and data security policy on MCP tools, APIs, and data sources |
Observe · Govern · Secure
The whole of Agent 365 in three pillars.
| Pillar | Purpose | Capabilities |
|---|---|---|
| 👁️ Observe | Monitor and manage agents in real time | Registry — register and track every agent · Mapping — visualize agent usage and behavior · Analytics — measure adoption, performance and ROI · Role-specific oversight — extend visibility to security and business leaders |
| 🛡️ Govern | Govern agents throughout their lifecycle | Onboarding — bring agents under control from day one · Integration management — control what agents can access and do · Lifecycle management — automate lifecycle policies · Audit and logging — strengthen traceability and be audit-ready · Data compliance — meet AI regulations and policies |
| 🔐 Secure | Protect all agents comprehensively | Access control — protect agent identities and access · Data security — prevent oversharing and data leaks · Threat protection — defend against threats and vulnerabilities |
Observe is inventory. Govern is lifecycle and guardrails. Secure is identity, data, and threats. For most organizations with divisions building independently, visibility pays first.
Observe — see the whole estate
Gain visibility into agents in your environment, understand how they're used, and act quickly on performance, behavior, and risk signals before they impact the business.
| Capability | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Agent registry | A unified view across Microsoft platforms and non-Microsoft ecosystems. Every agent registered and tracked. |
| Agent analytics — measure effectiveness | Track adoption, quality, performance, speed of task completion, and impact. This is the evidence layer for a board-level business case. |
| Agent map — visualize usage and behavior | See how agents fit into the broader ecosystem, connect with other agents, and perform over time. The fastest way to spot an agent chained to sensitive content. |
| Custom security attributes | Tag and group agents in Entra, then apply shared control policies to a whole group at once. |
| Sign-in and audit logs | All agent activities logged, consistent with user audit logs — same tooling, same investigation workflow. |
| Role-specific oversight | The right view for IT admins, security teams, AI admins, and business decision makers — each persona sees what they need to act on. |
One estate, four personas
Agent management spans every role — no one person can be all of these, and that is good security practice:
| Persona | Their question | What they need |
|---|---|---|
| IT admin | "How do I unlock agents to deliver safe and scalable impact?" | Bring agents under management · review & approve · agent usage · permissions, licences and tool access · ROI |
| Security & compliance | "Are the agents secure and our data protected?" | Enforce least privilege · secure agent access to resources · prevent data leaks · protection from threats and vulnerabilities |
| AI admin | "How do I balance compliance and innovation with AI?" | Ensure responsible AI usage · manage secure data access · review and approve AI agent usage |
| Business decision maker | "Are agents making my department successful?" | ROI · status against strategic departmental goals · agent usage |
➡️ The builder-side lens — Foundry Observability, per-agent traces, evals, and cost — lives in Layer 2 · Agent Operations. Same signals, different altitude.
Govern — guardrails and lifecycle
Establish guardrails for agents and people, onboard agents with IT oversight, and govern agent access to resources and data. Be audit-ready with built-in compliance and data retention.
Agent settings — the tenant default
Administrators enforce security, compliance, and governance standards while enabling flexibility for collaboration:
| Setting | Options |
|---|---|
| Allowed agent types | Allow agents built by Microsoft · built by your organization · built by external publishers — each independently controllable |
| Sharing | All users can share org-wide · no users can share org-wide (direct sharing with individuals still allowed) · only specific groups can share broadly |
| User access | All users (default) · no users · specific users or groups |
| Catalog visibility | Set which users and groups can view and install specific agents |
A practical first question for any deployment: would you allow external-publisher agents at all in phase one?
Admin actions — how an agent reaches users
IT approval is a real gate, not a formality:
| Action | Flow |
|---|---|
| Publish — make an agent available for installation | Developer creates and tests → submits for approval → admin views pending submissions → admin starts the publishing wizard → applies default or custom template → reviews permissions and grants consent |
| Activate — allow users/groups to install and create instances | User requests activation → admin views pending submissions → activation wizard → apply template → review permissions, grant consent |
| Deploy — automatically install for users so it's ready to use | Admin selects an undeployed agent from the registry → selects users or groups → reviews permissions, grants consent |
| Approve updates | When a developer publishes an update it appears as Update pending. Until approved, the previous version stays live for users — no silent change in production. |
Lifecycle automation
Rules-based agent management automatically enforces lifecycle policies:
- ⏱️ Expire inactive agents — after a pilot phase there are always agents nobody uses and nobody retired
- 🚩 Flag ownerless agents — with an alert and escalation workflow for unresolved cases, plus bulk reassignment to a manager
- 🚫 Block risky agents
- 🔄 Auto-revoke access via Entra Lifecycle Workflows — triggers include owner departure (account disabled), agent retirement, and risk threshold exceeded
Ownerless agents arise when the user who created a shared agent is deleted from the organization. You can block, remove, or reassign ownership — the new owner gains full edit and delete permissions plus access to files the previous owner uploaded, and the previous owner loses all access including read rights.
Connected agents
Connected agents are other Copilot-enabled agents that can share data with an agent — users can query and receive responses that include information from these linked agents.
Warning
Connecting two agents connects their data reach. Treat a connection request as a data-access decision, not a convenience feature.
Secure — identity, access, data, threats
Secure agent identities, control access to resources, prevent data oversharing and leaks, and defend against threats and vulnerabilities.
| Area | Capability |
|---|---|
| Access control | Guardrails — policies defining who can create, onboard and manage agents · Governed access — give agents access to the apps and resources they need to complete a task · Conditional access — enforce real-time access based on context and risk |
| Start secure | Extend conditional access and identity protection from users to agents — protecting agent identities and preventing breaches |
| Data security | Visibility into AI-related data exposure; protect the data agents create and access from oversharing, leaks, and risky behavior |
| DSPM for AI | Shows which agents are active and where sensitive data is exposed |
| Threat protection | Protect agents from threats, vulnerabilities and adversarial attacks. Detect, investigate and remediate incidents quickly, with visibility into attack paths |
Conditional access for agents
Conditional Access policies can target agent identities directly:
- Target — agent identities (select Agent as the identity type) and/or specific agent resources
- Conditions — agent risk level, location, device compliance
- Grant — require compliant resource · Block — deny high-risk agent access immediately
Entra ID Protection for agents contributes the risk signals: accessing unfamiliar resources, high sign-in attempt volume, anomalous patterns — automatically detecting and responding to risky agent identity behavior in real time.
Access scoping principles
- Grant agents only the MCP permissions they need — review permissions at the blueprint level, not agent by agent.
- Use custom security attributes in Entra to group agents and apply shared access restrictions.
Global Secure Access for agents
For Copilot Studio agents that use Computer Use or web browsing:
- Web content filtering for agent-initiated web access
- Threat filtering for outbound agent traffic
Agent 365 extends Zero Trust identity controls to every AI agent in your tenant.
Entra Agent ID: the identity model
Every Agent 365 agent receives a Microsoft Entra Agent ID — its enterprise identity. Entra Agent ID delivers secure access for AI agents, just as you do for employees, across three pillars:
| Pillar | What it delivers |
|---|---|
| Manage AI agents at scale | Visibility into the full agent fleet — agents built on Microsoft platforms and third parties, with or without Agent ID — brought under consistent guardrails. New agents are created with identity built in and secure by default. |
| Govern agent identities and lifecycle | Maintain accountability, manage lifecycle from creation to deactivation, and prevent access accumulating as teams and agent capabilities change — so agents do not outlive their purpose. |
| Protect agent access to resources | Enforce policy-based access controls, block risky agents when signals indicate compromise, and prevent agents reaching malicious or unauthorized resources. |
Anatomy of an agent identity
| Attribute | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Identifier | Each agent identity has a unique ID |
| Display name | The name shown when the agent is used |
| Sponsor | The human user responsible for the agent — this is the accountability anchor |
| Blueprint | The reusable template the identity derives from |
| (optional) Agent user | A user-like identity for agents that act like colleagues |
How it is modeled: an agent identity is a single-tenant service principal with an agent subtype classification. Unlike non-agentic service principals that operate independently, agent identities require their parent blueprint for impersonation and token exchange.
| Object | Role |
|---|---|
| Agent platform | The application used to build agents (Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, Security Copilot, third-party) |
| Agent blueprint | An application holding the agent's business logic and orchestration; creates and manages agent identities. Composed of a blueprint application (creates identities) plus a blueprint service principal (stores credentials). |
| Agent identity | An app-like identity derived from a service principal, representing an autonomous agent (@odata.type: agentIdentity). A blueprint can obtain tokens for its child identities through federated identity credential impersonation. |
| Agent ID user | An identity that acts like a user to access resources (@odata.type: agentUser). Each is tied to a specific agent instance parent, and from there to a blueprint. |
Authentication scenarios
| Scenario | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Attended (delegated / on-behalf-of) | The agent operates on behalf of a human user, using delegated permissions the user granted, acting under the user's authority. |
| Unattended — application | The agent acts under its own authority as a service/application identity, using app-assigned roles, RBAC, or Microsoft Graph permissions. |
| Unattended — agentic user | The agent acts as an autonomous identity with user-like claims, authenticating and operating independently. |
Governance tooling
- Agent ID Administrator — a built-in RBAC role for dedicated agent-governance staff
- Agent registry and agent collections in the Entra admin center
- Agent sign-in logs — agent activity alongside user, service principal, and managed identity sign-ins
Blueprints and policy templates
Two distinct concepts that are easy to confuse — and together they are how an agent starts secure instead of being secured afterwards.
| Concept | What it is |
|---|---|
| Agent blueprint | Identity & architecture template — an Entra-backed definition of an agent type. Defines what the agent is allowed to do, what systems or data it can access, who is responsible for it, and how it proves who it is. |
| Policy template | Governance configuration bundle — a predefined set of security, compliance, and access rules applied at publish/activate time. A default template includes essential security and compliance controls; custom templates add policies per your organization's requirements. |
Why blueprints are the control point
Instead of managing every agent individually, you manage a class of agents through its blueprint. Approve the blueprint once, and teams can create agents that inherit its permissions and policies.
This gives you scalability and control:
- Defines capabilities, required MCP tool access, security/compliance constraints, and audit rules
- Users request an instance; admins activate the blueprint → all instances inherit its rules
- Prevents shadow and rogue agents; anchors every agent in Entra-backed identity and permissions
- If a class of agents is compromised or behaves unusually, you disable the blueprint and every agent in that class is turned off — no per-agent firefighting
Blueprints are the control point you use to govern what comes in and out of your organization.
Heterogeneous by design: any agent, any builder
Agent 365 is not just for Microsoft — it's for any agent.
Agent sources that land natively
Microsoft 365 Copilot · Copilot Studio · Microsoft Foundry · Microsoft Teams · Security Copilot
Agent 365 SDK — bring everything else
A broad partner ecosystem already integrates with the Agent 365 SDK, so those agents are ready to start secure out of the box. The SDK carries Entra, Defender, and Purview, plus observability based on OpenTelemetry.
Integrated partners span agent platforms, enterprise SaaS, and frameworks — including Anthropic, OpenAI, SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, Adobe, Databricks, LangChain, CrewAI, Cognition, Glean, Perplexity, Box, Cursor, NVIDIA, Sophos, Zendesk, and others.
Third-party agent integration flow
Third-party agent platforms (for example Gemini or Amazon Bedrock) often need secure access to protected resources — custom REST APIs, Azure Blob Storage — during their reasoning or orchestration loops.
3P Agent Runtime Agent Host App Entra Agent ID SDK Microsoft Entra ID
(Gemini/Bedrock/…) (Tool Executor) (sidecar) (Token Service)
│ │ │ │
│── tool call requested ─▶│ │ │
│ │── execute tool ──────▶│ │
│ │ │── request token ───────▶│
│ │ │◀── access token (JWT) ──│
│ │◀──────────────────────│ │
│ │ │
│ └──▶ Protected Resource (Authorization: Bearer …) │
│◀─ tool result ──────────┘
The agent runtime does not handle authentication or OAuth directly. The host runtime forwards the request to the SDK, which establishes the execution context — autonomous (agent-only identity) or delegated (on behalf of a signed-in user via OAuth 2.0 on-behalf-of). Two access models are available:
| Model | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Token Broker | The SDK acquires an OAuth 2.0 access token from Entra and returns it to the host, which adds it to the Authorization header. Ideal when you want direct control over API calls. |
| Downstream Call Broker | The SDK handles both token acquisition and the HTTP call — minimal involvement in authentication for the host. |
Tokens are standard JWTs with issuer, audience, expiration, and authorization claims. Open standards throughout: A2A protocol, MCP, OIDC, OAuth 2.0.
This is how identity stays consistent whether an agent runs in Foundry, on AKS, on-premises, or on another cloud entirely.
The connective tissue: linking traffic to an agent
This is the role that makes Agent 365 more than an inventory: it is what attributes activity to a specific, owned agent, and what aggregates signals from every layer into one control plane.
The attribution problem it solves
Most AI traffic reaches models via proxies or gateways, losing the user identity in the process. Without an identity layer you can see that something called a model — you cannot say which agent, on whose behalf, under what approval, or with what data.
Agent 365 closes that gap:
| Signal source | What it contributes | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
| 🔷 Layer 1 · Governance Hub | Gateway audit logs — identity, access contract, model, routing, outcome for every call | Streamed to Defender / Sentinel, correlated to the agent identity |
| 🔶 Layer 2 · Agent Operations | Foundry traces, evaluations, guardrail decisions, red-team findings | Correlated per agent; Foundry agents carry their Entra Agent ID |
| 🟢 Layer 3 · Agent Management | Agent sign-in logs, registry metadata, blueprint, named sponsor, lifecycle state, approval history | The Agent 365 dashboard and Entra audit logs |
| 🛡️ Layer 4 · Security Foundation | Defender posture, threat detections and attack paths; Purview classification, DLP and audit of interactions | Consolidated into the unified Agent 365 dashboard |
Agent 365 consolidates Entra, Defender, and Purview insights into a single agent-centric view. That is what turns four separate telemetry streams into one answerable question: "what did this agent do, and was it allowed to?"
Triage in practice
Because activity is attributable, investigation becomes a normal security workflow rather than an archaeology exercise. A worked example from the field:
- Foundry guardrails block a jailbreak attempt on a procurement agent → real-time signal exchange raises a Defender alert.
- The analyst sees other alerts correlated into the same incident — because attackers try multiple routes.
- A phishing alert shows a malicious URL sent to the agent — blocked by policy preventing agents from accessing user-supplied URLs.
- A Purview DLP alert, surfaced in the same Defender portal, shows sensitive data processing was blocked and an external email with sensitive data prevented — exactly as it would have been for a user.
- The analyst resolves the incident and returns the agent to work — with evidence.
Advanced hunting queries can pivot directly on agent activity — for example filtering cloud app events for agent invocation and inference actions — so the SOC can build custom detections on the same substrate it already uses.
Regulatory alignment and audit
Compliance cannot be a manual checkbox at the scale of thousands of agents. Agent 365 is where regulatory obligations become evidence, because it is the only layer that can answer which agent, owned by whom, did what, to which data, under which approved blueprint.
| Regulatory need | What Agent 365 and its foundation provide |
|---|---|
| Inventory & registration of AI systems | An authoritative registry spanning Microsoft and non-Microsoft agents — the system-of-record for "what AI do we run?" |
| Accountability & human oversight | Every agent has a named sponsor and owner; ownerless agents are detected, escalated, and reassigned by rule |
| Attribution & traceability | Agent sign-in and audit logs consistent with user audit logs; activity attributable to a specific agent identity rather than a shared gateway credential |
| Change control | Publish/activate approval gates; update-pending status so no version change reaches users unreviewed; versioned blueprints |
| Least privilege & access review | Blueprint-level permission review, custom security attributes, conditional access, access packages, expiration and recertification |
| Right to revoke | Block the agent in Agent 365, disable the blueprint to stop an entire class, revoke the access contract at the Governance Hub, or auto-revoke via lifecycle workflow |
| Data handling evidence | Purview audit of interactions, classification of prompts and responses, DLP enforcement, retention and eDiscovery — see Layer 4 |
| Assessment & reporting | Compliance Manager assessment templates for the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF and ISO 42001 provide guided control mapping and evidence collection |
The reason this matters: a regulator's question is never "is your platform secure?" It is "show me this specific decision, made by this specific system, and prove who was accountable." Layer 3 is the layer that can answer it.
Note
Best practice: establish ALL governance policies BEFORE enabling self-service agent creation. Proactive governance prevents agent sprawl — retrofitting it afterwards is materially harder.
Prerequisites and dependencies
Agent 365 extends security and governance to agents — it does not replace the foundation underneath it. It relies on capabilities you configure in the underlying Microsoft 365 security stack:
| Component | What Agent 365 depends on it for |
|---|---|
| Purview | Advanced classification; auto-labeling of grounding data; audit |
| Defender | Agent detection; posture and runtime protection; threat hunting and investigation |
| Entra | Identity protection; network controls for agents |
| Intune | Controls for local agents on Windows endpoints |
Important
The security foundation is not an optional add-on to the Agent 365 story — it supplies the core security, identity, endpoint, and data capabilities Agent 365 functionality relies on. Confirm the current licensing prerequisites and the exact capability set with your Microsoft account team; align with the Security team early for assessment and sizing.
Suggested enablement baseline
- Enable audit logs — Purview portal → Audit → verify auditing is ON for the organization
- Connect Defender — Defender portal → Settings → Security for AI → connect the Microsoft 365 connector
- Review the Agent 365 enterprise app — Entra admin center → Enterprise Apps → review permissions and user assignments
- Create a conditional access policy targeting agent identities
- Review initial agent risk posture — Purview → DSPM for AI → AI observability → top recommendations
- Create an Insider Risk Management policy using the Risky AI Usage template
- Publish sensitivity labels for SharePoint and OneDrive
- Validate with advanced hunting on agent invocation and inference events
Integration with the other layers
| Layer | Integration |
|---|---|
| 🔷 Layer 1 (Governance Hub) | Agent identities are validated at the gateway for access control and policy enforcement. Gateway audit logs carry the calling identity, so traffic is attributable to a registered agent. Revoking an agent's access contract is a second, independent kill switch alongside blocking it in Agent 365. |
| 🔶 Layer 2 (Agent Operations) | Foundry integrates natively with Entra Agent ID across the lifecycle. All unpublished or in-development agents in a project share a common identity — simplifying administration, reducing identity sprawl, and preserving developer autonomy during experimentation. Once published, an agent gains its own blueprint and identity bound to the agent application resource. Copilot Studio integrates natively via opt-in, with in-development agents in an environment sharing a common blueprint. |
| 🛡️ Layer 4 (Security Foundation) | Entra provides durable identity at build time, access governance with conditional permissions, identity alignment with existing enterprise systems, lineage tracking, and permission control through familiar identity governance. Defender monitors for identity-based threats and contributes agent inventory and attack-path context. Purview enforces data governance based on agent access and behavior. Agent 365 consolidates all three into one dashboard. |
Defense in depth
Agent Management is the primary enforcement point for agent types whose traffic never touches your gateway or Foundry. The worked example: Microsoft Copilot agents — their traffic doesn't traverse your gateway or Foundry, so those controls can't apply out of the box, but Agent 365 together with Defender enforces it, on top of Copilot's own native protections.
Same risk, multiple enforcement points — if one control can't apply or is bypassed, another does.
Where it earns its keep
The moment agents act autonomously on the state of the business — Frontier pillar 3, Reshape business processes — Agent Management becomes critical: whose identity, who owns it, can I revoke it. Same controls, higher stakes.
Ownership & outcomes
| Accountable | IAM (identity, lifecycle & inventory) · AI Engineering (register & own) · Security (behavioural insight) |
| The question it answers | "When an agent acts, whose identity is it using, who owns it, what can it touch, and can I see it and revoke it?" |
| What you gain | Every agent becomes a first-class, owned, least-privilege enterprise identity with full inventory and behavioural visibility — closing the shadow-agent gap before it appears. |
| The advantage | Every agent owned and accountable. First-class identities give each agent a clear owner, lifecycle, and audit trail — no orphaned or shadow agents across the estate. |
Key RACI rows (full matrix in Organizational Alignment & Ownership)
| # | Decision | Accountable | Responsible |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | Issue & govern agent identities | IAM | AI Eng |
| 3.2 | Agent lifecycle & ownership | IAM | AI Eng |
| 3.3 | Agent inventory & behavioural insight | IAM | Security |
IAM is accountable across all three activities. AI Engineering is responsible for registering its agents and being the named sponsor. Security is responsible for the behavioural and threat insight that Agent 365 surfaces.
Who should own agent identity? The team that owns user identity today. That is the whole logic of extending existing infrastructure rather than standing up a parallel one.
Activation
Track 3 — Agent Management
| Stage | Activity |
|---|---|
| Deep Dive | Microsoft Agent 365 — agent management, ownership & lifecycle; design the agent blueprints and policy templates |
| Proof of Value | Govern Agents PoV — register, activate, monitor & retire real agents, proving visibility and control |
| Production | Scale Identities — safely and consistently across the organization |
Activate — no infrastructure to provision. Agent 365 requires no landing zone.
Exit criteria
- Audit logs enabled; Defender connector configured; sensitivity labels published
- Agent blueprints and policy templates defined and approved
- Every published agent carries a unique Entra Agent ID with a named sponsor
- Agent settings configured — allowed agent types, sharing, user access, catalog visibility
- Publish / activate / deploy approval gates operating
- Shadow-agent detection running; discovered agents triaged
- Lifecycle rules live — expire inactive, flag ownerless, block risky, auto-revoke on owner departure
- Conditional access policies targeting agent identities
- Non-Microsoft agents registered via the Agent 365 SDK
- Authoritative inventory and agent map visible in the Agent 365 dashboard
- Revocation tested — block in Agent 365, disable the blueprint, and revoke the access contract at the gateway
➡️ Full track detail: Technical Activation Paths
Resources
- Governing agent identities with Entra ID: https://learn.microsoft.com/entra/id-governance/agent-id-governance-overview
- Microsoft Entra Agent ID: https://learn.microsoft.com/entra/agent-id/
- Conditional Access for agent identities: https://learn.microsoft.com/entra/identity/conditional-access/agent-id
- Citadel end-to-end guidance: AI Citadel Blueprint overview
Note
Capability maturity moves quickly. Several capabilities described here are in preview at the time of writing while others are generally available. Verify current status on Microsoft Learn before committing to a delivery date — do not promise a preview capability as production-ready.
Related guidance
- Overview — AI Citadel Blueprint
- Layer 1 · Governance Hub
- Layer 2 · Agent Operations
- Layer 4 · Security Foundation — what identity unlocks
- Organizational Alignment & Ownership
- Technical Activation Paths
AI Citadel Blueprint × Frontier Transformation · Microsoft · Global Black Belt