Identity-Centric Security in Cloud-Native Systems: Advanced IAM, Workload Identity, and Vaultless Secrets Management

The swift advancement of cloud-native architectures, built on microservices, containers, and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, has profoundly altered contemporary computing environments. Although these architectures offer scalability, agility, and operational efficiency, they also present new security challenges concerning identity management, secret distribution, and access governance. Conventional identity and access management (IAM) systems, designed for static infrastructures, often fall short in highly dynamic cloud-native ecosystems. This research article explores innovative strategies for managing identity, access, and secrets in cloud-native environments, with an emphasis on cloud-native IAM models, automated secret rotation, vaultless security strategies, and workload identity frameworks. The research employs a design science methodology to conceptualize, implement, and assess a cloud-native identity framework that integrates workload identity mechanisms, policy-as-code enforcement, and automated secrets management. The findings indicate that identity-first architectures enhance security posture, minimize credential exposure risks, and facilitate dynamic trust evaluation across distributed workloads. The study concludes with actionable recommendations and future research avenues for establishing secure cloud-native identity ecosystems.