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How much does IT AMC cost in the USA?

IT AMC pricing in the United States is scoped per engagement and depends on the number of devices, support level, and services included. Small businesses with basic coverage sit at the entry level, and comprehensive packages scale with the size of your estate. We offer the best affordable IT AMC solutions in United States with customized pricing.

What is included in managed IT services in the USA?

Our managed IT services in the USA include complete IT infrastructure management, 24/7 monitoring and support, cybersecurity, cloud services, backup and disaster recovery, help desk support, network management, and proactive maintenance. It's a complete IT department solution with affordable monthly pricing.

What is the response time for IT support in the USA?

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We provide IT support and managed IT services across all major USA cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, and San Jose. We serve businesses nationwide with complete IT support.

Why is GR IT Services the best IT company in the USA?

GR IT Services combines reliable 24/7 support, a 5-minute P1 response SLA, complete IT solutions, and certified Microsoft CSP and Apple Jamf partner status. We provide IT AMC and managed IT services across the USA with a guaranteed SLA and senior engineers on every engagement.

Entra workload identities for US businesses

Every control you built was designed to protect people. Attackers have moved on to the identities that are not people at all.

The documentation puts it plainly enough: recent attacks show adversaries increasingly going after non-human identities in preference to human ones. Applications, service principals and managed identities hold genuine access, carry multiple credentials each, and almost nobody in the business ever reviews them.

Book a workload identity review See what we assess

Entra workload identities for US organizations

3 typesApplications, service principals, managed identities
No MFABecause there is nobody to prompt
Multiple credsPer workload, unlike a human user
Rarely revokedBecause nobody knows when they should be

What we assess and control

Eight things that bring the non-human half of your directory under control.

This is the population where every control you already own stops applying. No MFA to enforce. No user to train. No offboarding process to trigger when something ends. What remains is inventory, credential hygiene, policy and review, and most estates run none of those four.

Knowing what you actually have

Within Entra, a workload identity means an application, a service principal or a managed identity. The application object is the global representation spanning all tenants, while the service principal is the local instance inside one specific tenant defining what that application is actually able to do there. Producing the inventory almost always surprises somebody.

Credential sprawl, which is structural rather than careless

The documentation captures the difference neatly. A human user typically holds one identity used across a broad range of resources. A software workload may be handling multiple credentials for different resources, every one of which has to be stored securely somewhere. That asymmetry is exactly why credential hygiene is harder for this population than for your staff.

Conditional Access for service principals you own

Conditional Access policies can be applied to the service principals your organization owns, which brings location and risk conditions to bear on non-human sign-ins. One scoping detail matters a great deal here: that covers service principals you own, and not every third-party application sitting in your tenant.

Real-time enforcement through continuous access evaluation

Continuous access evaluation for workload identities gives you real-time enforcement of Conditional Access location and risk policies. It closes precisely the gap it closes for people, being the window between a condition changing and the session genuinely stopping, and for a workload that window can otherwise stretch a very long way.

Risk detection, including leaked credentials

Risks including leaked credentials on workload identities are detected by Entra ID Protection, which then contains the threat and reduces the risk. Leaked credentials is the detection carrying the most weight in this population, because a service principal secret committed into a repository is among the most common routes by which one of these gets compromised.

Removing secrets entirely where you can

A managed identity is a special kind of service principal that removes the need for developers to manage any credentials at all, and it applies to workloads running on Azure. Workload identity federation covers everything else in the supported scenarios, which includes GitHub Actions, workloads on Kubernetes, and compute platforms sitting outside Azure entirely.

Reviewing the privileged ones

Access reviews for service principals cover the service principals and applications assigned to privileged directory roles. Nobody runs this review, and it is the one that turns up an application granted a directory role during a project three years ago which nothing has used since.

Agent identities, the newest population

Entra Agent ID supplies identity constructs built for AI agents, bringing enforced human sponsorship, lifecycle governance running from provisioning through to deactivation, and management at scale applying centralized policy across every agent instance of a given type. Design for it now rather than retrofitting it later.

Why this population is different

Nobody can reliably tell when a workload identity was created, or when it ought to be revoked.

That specific difficulty is named in the documentation, and it explains why non-human identities pile up in a way human accounts never do.

Behind every human account sits a creation event somebody requested and a revocation event somebody eventually triggers, because a person arrived and a person departed. A service principal comes into existence through a developer, a deployment or a consent prompt, and nothing whatsoever changes in the organization on the day the thing it served stops being used.
Credentials make it worse still. Your human users typically hold one identity spanning many resources. A software workload may be carrying several credentials for different resources, each requiring secure storage, each with an expiry date that somebody has to notice before it passes.
Which is why the assessment opens with inventory rather than policy. Applying Conditional Access to the service principals you own, or reviewing the ones holding privileged directory roles, is impossible until somebody knows which exist and what each of them was created to do.
The direction everything is heading is removing credentials rather than getting better at managing them. Managed identities take credential management away entirely for workloads running on Azure, and workload identity federation covers the supported scenarios outside it, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes and other compute platforms among them. Each workload moved across is one fewer secret anybody has to rotate.

Ask us to inventory your service principals

How we approach it

Four things that make this a program rather than a clean-up.

Deleting unused service principals feels productive on the day and changes nothing structural at all. What genuinely moves the position is ownership, eliminating credentials, and a review that keeps recurring.

We attribute ownership before we change anything

The documentation acknowledges how hard it is to track when a workload identity was created or when it should be revoked. Attribution is the work that fixes it, and attribution comes from conversations rather than from queries. An identity carrying a named owner can be reviewed, reduced and eventually retired. One without an owner cannot safely be touched at all.

We remove secrets rather than rotating them better

For workloads running on Azure, a managed identity removes the need to manage credentials altogether, while workload identity federation handles the supported scenarios beyond it including GitHub Actions, Kubernetes and compute outside Azure. Each workload moved across is one fewer secret capable of leaking or expiring at exactly the wrong moment.

We apply policy where it genuinely applies

Conditional Access for workload identities reaches the service principals your organization owns, with continuous access evaluation adding real-time enforcement of location and risk on top. Being precise about that scope heads off a common and dangerous assumption, which is that the policy covers every application present in the tenant.

We start the review with the privileged subset

Access reviews for service principals cover the applications assigned to privileged directory roles, and that subset is where the risk actually concentrates. Reviewing a hundred privileged workload identities thoroughly is a far better use of the available effort than skimming several thousand, and it is also where the uncomfortable findings turn out to be.

How an engagement runs

Four phases across roughly six to eight weeks.

Inventory takes up most of the early phases, for two reasons. The population is genuinely unknown in most tenants, and attributing each identity to an owner requires conversations rather than queries.

01
Weeks 1 to 2
Inventory and attribute ownership
We list every application, service principal and managed identity, together with what each can reach, which credentials it holds and when those expire. Then comes the harder half: who owns it and what it exists to do. Any identity nobody can attribute is itself the finding rather than an inconvenience delaying the report.
- Full workload identity inventory
- Permissions and directory roles mapped per identity
- Credential inventory with expiry dates
- Unattributable identities listed separately
02
Weeks 3 to 4
Reduce permissions and remove secrets
Identities holding more permission than they use get brought down to what they actually consume, and credentials get eliminated wherever the workload can move onto a managed identity or onto workload identity federation. Every secret removed is a secret that cannot leak, cannot expire at an awkward moment, and never needs rotating again.
- Excess permissions identified and reduced
- Managed identity migration candidates confirmed
- Federation candidates identified for GitHub Actions and Kubernetes
- Remaining secrets moved to proper storage with rotation
03
Weeks 5 to 6
Apply policy and detection
Conditional Access goes onto the service principals your organization owns, continuous access evaluation is enabled so location and risk are enforced in real time, and ID Protection risk detection gets reviewed so that a leaked credential finding reaches somebody who will actually do something about it.
- Conditional Access policies for owned service principals
- Continuous access evaluation enabled where supported
- Risk detection reviewed and routed to an owner
- Custom security attributes applied for classification
04
Weeks 7 to 8
Establish review and lifecycle
Access reviews get configured for the service principals and applications holding privileged directory roles, a creation process captures ownership at the moment each identity is created, and a decommission path exists so identities are removed when whatever they served gets retired.
- Access reviews configured for privileged service principals
- Creation process capturing owner and purpose
- Decommission path defined and tested
- An agreed approach to agent identity wherever AI workloads fall in scope

Where this matters

Six situations where non-human identity is the exposure.

What these share is a business that did the human identity work properly and has never once examined the other half of its directory.

A business that found a secret in source control

This triggers more of these engagements than anything else, and Entra ID Protection detects leaked credentials on workload identities specifically. Rotation is the immediate response. The genuinely useful response is asking how many other secrets exist, where each of them lives, and which of those workloads could stop using secrets altogether.

A regulated firm asked to evidence privileged access review

A SOC 2 auditor, a HIPAA assessor or an NYDFS Part 500 review typically covers your people and goes no further. Applications and service principals holding privileged directory roles carry comparable access and are almost never in scope. Access reviews for service principals close that gap, and they produce evidence in the same form as the human review it sits beside.

An organization with years of accumulated integrations

Every project leaves a service principal behind, and nothing ever removes them, because nothing about the organization changes on the day a project ends. Inventory and attribution reliably turn up a meaningful proportion that nobody can account for at all, which is simultaneously a risk finding and the opening of a licensing conversation.

A company running CI/CD pipelines into Azure

A pipeline authenticating with a long-lived secret is a well understood risk, and an entirely avoidable one. Workload identity federation supports scenarios including GitHub Actions and workloads running on Kubernetes, which takes the stored credential out of the pipeline altogether.

An operator whose outage was a credential expiry

A client secret expires, an integration stops working, and nobody saw it coming because nobody owned that identity. What you have there is an availability incident produced by an identity governance gap. The fix is an inventory with expiry tracking behind it, or better still, moving the workload off secrets entirely so the question never arises.

A business starting to deploy AI agents

Agent identities form a distinct category carrying governance requirements of their own, and Entra Agent ID supplies enforced human sponsorship, lifecycle governance running from provisioning to deactivation, and centralized policy applied across agent instances. Designing that in now is considerably less work than retrofitting it later.

Three positions

How US organizations govern non-human identity.

The right column is simply the norm. The middle column is where most businesses arrive after one incident has concentrated attention. The left column is a program rather than a project, and it should be scoped as one.

Complete inventory

Governed as a populationMaintained

Reactive after an incidentPoint in time

UngovernedNone

Ownership attributable

Governed as a populationPer identity

Reactive after an incidentFor some

UngovernedNo

Permissions right sized

Governed as a populationYes

Reactive after an incidentFor the ones examined

UngovernedNo

Secrets eliminated where possible

Governed as a populationManaged identity and federation

Reactive after an incidentPartly

UngovernedNo

Conditional Access applied

Governed as a populationTo owned service principals

Reactive after an incidentNo

UngovernedNo

Real-time enforcement

Governed as a populationContinuous access evaluation

Reactive after an incidentNo

UngovernedNo

Leaked credential detection acted on

Governed as a populationRouted to an owner

Reactive after an incidentSometimes

UngovernedUnseen

Privileged ones reviewed

Governed as a populationAccess reviews

Reactive after an incidentNo

UngovernedNo

Decommission path exists

Governed as a populationYes

Reactive after an incidentNo

UngovernedNo

AI agent identities planned for

Governed as a populationYes

Reactive after an incidentNo

UngovernedNo

Feature	Governed as a population	Reactive after an incident	Ungoverned
Complete inventory	Maintained	Point in time	None
Ownership attributable	Per identity	For some	No
Permissions right sized	Yes	For the ones examined	No
Secrets eliminated where possible	Managed identity and federation	Partly	No
Conditional Access applied	To owned service principals	No	No
Real-time enforcement	Continuous access evaluation	No	No
Leaked credential detection acted on	Routed to an owner	Sometimes	Unseen
Privileged ones reviewed	Access reviews	No	No
Decommission path exists	Yes	No	No
AI agent identities planned for	Yes	No	No

Human against non-human

Why the controls you already built do not transfer.

Every row here is a control that works perfectly well for people and either does not exist for workloads or does not apply to them. That gap is exactly why this population needs a program of its own rather than an extension of the existing one.

Control

Multifactor authentication

Human identities: Standard
Workload identities: Not applicable, nobody to prompt

Control

Number of credentials

Human identities: Typically one identity
Workload identities: Potentially many, per resource

Control

Creation trigger

Human identities: A person joins
Workload identities: A developer, deployment or consent

Control

Revocation trigger

Human identities: A person leaves
Workload identities: Frequently nothing at all

Control

Conditional Access

Human identities: Full policy set
Workload identities: Service principals your organization owns

Control

Continuous access evaluation

Human identities: Supported
Workload identities: Supported for workload identities

Control

Risk detection

Human identities: ID Protection
Workload identities: ID Protection, including leaked credentials

Control

Periodic review

Human identities: Access reviews
Workload identities: Access reviews for service principals in privileged roles

Control

Credential elimination

Human identities: Passwordless methods
Workload identities: Managed identities and workload identity federation

Control

Security awareness training

Human identities: Applicable
Workload identities: Not applicable

Control	Human identities	Workload identities
Multifactor authentication	Standard	Not applicable, nobody to prompt
Number of credentials	Typically one identity	Potentially many, per resource
Creation trigger	A person joins	A developer, deployment or consent
Revocation trigger	A person leaves	Frequently nothing at all
Conditional Access	Full policy set	Service principals your organization owns
Continuous access evaluation	Supported	Supported for workload identities
Risk detection	ID Protection	ID Protection, including leaked credentials
Periodic review	Access reviews	Access reviews for service principals in privileged roles
Credential elimination	Passwordless methods	Managed identities and workload identity federation
Security awareness training	Applicable	Not applicable

How an engagement runs

Five steps, and the first invariably takes longer than anybody plans for.

Producing the inventory is quick. Attributing every identity to an owner and a purpose is what consumes the time, and it is also what makes everything that comes afterwards possible.

1
Inventory applications, service principals and managed identities
We establish what exists, what each one can reach, which of them hold privileged directory roles, and which are yours as opposed to belonging to a third party. That final distinction carries real weight, because Conditional Access for workload identities applies to the service principals your organization owns rather than to every application in the tenant.
2
Attribute ownership and purpose
Every identity gets a named owner and a stated purpose. This is the step converting a list into something anybody can act on. Identities nobody can attribute are flagged rather than quietly deleted, because deleting an unattributed identity is precisely how an outage happens.
3
Reduce permissions and eliminate credentials
Permissions come down to what is genuinely being used, and workloads move onto managed identities where they run on Azure or onto workload identity federation where they run anywhere else. Whatever secrets remain afterwards go into proper storage with their expiry tracked and a named owner responsible for rotating them.
4
Apply policy and route the detections
Conditional Access goes onto the service principals your organization owns, continuous access evaluation enforces location and risk in real time, and ID Protection workload identity risk detections get routed to somebody who will act on them, with leaked credential findings treated as the priority.
5
Establish review and lifecycle
Access reviews cover the service principals and applications holding privileged directory roles, a creation process captures ownership at the moment of creation rather than years afterwards, and a decommission path ensures that retiring a system retires its identity alongside it.

Straight answers

What US organizations ask about workload identities.

It is an identity assigned to a piece of software rather than a person, whether that software is an application, a service, a script or a container, allowing it to authenticate and reach other services and resources. Inside Entra specifically, that means applications, service principals and managed identities.

The application object is the global representation spanning every tenant, describing how tokens get issued, which resources the application needs and what actions it is able to take. The service principal is the local instance inside one particular tenant, defining what that application can genuinely do there, who is able to access it and what it can reach.

Because the attackers moved. Recent cyber attacks are documented as showing adversaries increasingly targeting non-human identities in preference to human ones. Businesses that invested heavily in phishing-resistant authentication succeeded in making human identity hard, while the other half of their directory stayed exactly as it was.

The reason is named directly: tracking when a workload identity is created, or when it ought to be revoked, is hard. A human account has a hire date and a departure date bracketing it. A service principal gets created by a developer or by a deployment, and nothing organizational happens at all on the day the thing it served is retired.

You can, using Conditional Access for workload identities, applied to the service principals your organization owns. That scope matters a great deal. It reaches your own service principals rather than every third-party application sitting in your tenant, which is why the inventory has to distinguish between the two in the first place.

It does. Continuous access evaluation for workload identities gives real-time enforcement of Conditional Access location and risk policies. In some respects it matters more here than it does for people, because a workload session never gets interrupted by somebody closing a laptop and going home.

A managed identity is a special type of service principal that eliminates the need for developers to manage credentials, for workloads that run on Azure. Where a workload qualifies, yes. It removes an entire class of problem rather than making it easier to manage.

Workload identity federation covers supported scenarios including GitHub Actions, workloads running on Kubernetes, and workloads running in compute platforms outside Azure. It gives access to Entra protected resources without needing to manage secrets, which is the same benefit reached a different way.

Entra ID Protection detects risks including leaked credentials for workload identities. The detection existing is only half of it, though. The other half is somebody receiving the finding and having the authority to rotate or disable the identity, which is an ownership question.

For the important subset, yes. Access reviews cover service principals and applications assigned to privileged directory roles in Entra ID. Starting there is the right call, because reviewing a hundred privileged workload identities properly beats skimming several thousand of every kind.

Flag them rather than deleting them. An unattributed service principal might be running something genuinely important that nobody has had cause to think about for two years. The safe route is disabling it with a documented rollback and a waiting period behind that, instead of a deletion that turns into an incident.

As a distinct category of their own. Entra Agent ID gives agent identities enforced human sponsorship, lifecycle governance covering provisioning through to deactivation, and management at scale that applies centralized security policy across every agent instance of a given type. Design for that before agents start proliferating rather than afterwards.

Start with the inventory, then narrow to the privileged subset. Count the service principals, identify which of them hold privileged directory roles, and try naming an owner for each one in that group. Businesses doing only that much have usually turned up something worth acting on before they reach the end of the list.

Both count as machine identities. A workload identity represents software, meaning an application, a service, a script or a container. A device identity represents hardware, meaning a desktop, a phone or an IoT sensor. Each needs different controls, and confusing the two is precisely why workload identity so often falls into the gap between two teams.

There is, using custom security attributes on an application. That capability is what makes prioritization possible at all inside a tenant holding hundreds of service principals, because it separates the ones supporting a critical system from the ones supporting a reporting job somebody wrote three years ago and forgot.

Because the shape of the problem is genuinely different. A human user typically holds one identity used across a broad range of resources. A software workload may be handling multiple credentials to reach different resources, every one needing secure storage, and tracking when any of them was created or when it should be revoked is hard.

Scoping happens per engagement, driven by tenant size and the number of integrations, since the attribution effort scales with those rather than with how many users you have. A first step that costs nothing: count the service principals in your tenant, then count how many hold a privileged directory role. Both numbers usually come back higher than anybody expected.

Self assessment

Fifteen questions covering the non-human half of your tenant.

Being unable to answer the first three is itself the engagement. Very few businesses can, and it says nothing about the quality of the team.

Inventory

How many service principals exist?
A number, not an impression.
How many hold a privileged directory role?
This is the critical subset.
Can we name an owner for each?
Usually not.
How many managed identities do we run?
And what do they access.
Which are third party rather than ours?
Policy scoping depends on it.

Credentials

How many client secrets are in use?
And where are they stored.
When does the next one expire?
Expiry causes outages.
Has any secret ever been in source control?
Check, do not assume.
Could this workload use a managed identity?
It eliminates credential management.
Could this pipeline use federation?
GitHub Actions is supported.

Control

Any Conditional Access on service principals?
For ones we own.
Is continuous access evaluation enabled?
For real-time enforcement.
Who sees workload identity risk detections?
Leaked credentials especially.
Do we review privileged service principals?
Access reviews support this.
Do we have AI agents in the tenant?
Agent ID governs them.

The pages around this one.

Privileged Identity Management

The equivalent discipline for human privileged access.

Entra ID Protection

Where leaked credential detections for workloads surface.

Entra access reviews

The recurring review that covers privileged service principals as well as people.

Next step

Count the service principals in your tenant. Then count how many carry a privileged directory role.

After that, try naming an owner for every entry in the second group. Most businesses work part way down that list and come to a halt, and that halt is precisely the finding worth acting on.

Book a workload identity review See Microsoft Entra services

Related Services

Explore more solutions that work great with this service

Every control you built was designed to protect people. Attackers have moved on to the identities that are not people at all.

Feature

Governed as a population

Reactive after an incident

Ungoverned

Complete inventory

Maintained

Point in time

None

Ownership attributable

Per identity

For some

Permissions right sized

Yes

For the ones examined

Secrets eliminated where possible

Managed identity and federation

Partly

Conditional Access applied

To owned service principals

Real-time enforcement

Continuous access evaluation

Leaked credential detection acted on

Routed to an owner

Sometimes

Unseen

Privileged ones reviewed

Access reviews

Decommission path exists

Yes

AI agent identities planned for

Yes

Control

Human identities

Workload identities

Multifactor authentication

Standard

Not applicable, nobody to prompt

Number of credentials

Typically one identity

Potentially many, per resource

Creation trigger

A person joins

A developer, deployment or consent

Revocation trigger

A person leaves

Frequently nothing at all

Conditional Access

Full policy set

Service principals your organization owns

Continuous access evaluation

Supported

Supported for workload identities

Risk detection

ID Protection

ID Protection, including leaked credentials

Periodic review

Access reviews

Access reviews for service principals in privileged roles

Credential elimination

Passwordless methods

Managed identities and workload identity federation

Security awareness training

Applicable

Not applicable

Every control you built was designed to protect people. Attackers have moved on to the identities that are not people at all.

Eight things that bring the non-human half of your directory under control.

Knowing what you actually have

Credential sprawl, which is structural rather than careless

Conditional Access for service principals you own

Real-time enforcement through continuous access evaluation

Risk detection, including leaked credentials

Removing secrets entirely where you can

Reviewing the privileged ones

Agent identities, the newest population

Nobody can reliably tell when a workload identity was created, or when it ought to be revoked.

Four things that make this a program rather than a clean-up.

We attribute ownership before we change anything

We remove secrets rather than rotating them better

We apply policy where it genuinely applies

We start the review with the privileged subset

Four phases across roughly six to eight weeks.

Inventory and attribute ownership

Reduce permissions and remove secrets

Apply policy and detection

Establish review and lifecycle

Six situations where non-human identity is the exposure.

A business that found a secret in source control

A regulated firm asked to evidence privileged access review

An organization with years of accumulated integrations

A company running CI/CD pipelines into Azure

An operator whose outage was a credential expiry

A business starting to deploy AI agents

How US organizations govern non-human identity.

Why the controls you already built do not transfer.

Multifactor authentication

Number of credentials

Creation trigger

Revocation trigger

Conditional Access

Continuous access evaluation

Risk detection

Periodic review

Credential elimination

Security awareness training

Five steps, and the first invariably takes longer than anybody plans for.

Inventory applications, service principals and managed identities

Attribute ownership and purpose

Reduce permissions and eliminate credentials

Apply policy and route the detections

Establish review and lifecycle

What US organizations ask about workload identities.

What exactly is a workload identity?

How does an application object differ from a service principal?

Why is this suddenly a priority?

Why do these accumulate so badly?

Can we apply Conditional Access to them?

Does continuous access evaluation apply here too?

Should we be using managed identities, and what are they exactly?

What about workloads that do not run on Azure?

How would we know if a credential leaked?

Can we review these the way we review user access?

What do we do about identities nobody can explain?

What about AI agents?

Where should we start?

Where does a device identity end and a workload identity begin?

Is there a way to classify these by importance?

Why is this harder than securing user accounts?

What does an engagement cost?

Fifteen questions covering the non-human half of your tenant.

Inventory

Credentials

Control

The pages around this one.

Privileged Identity Management

Entra ID Protection

Entra access reviews

Count the service principals in your tenant. Then count how many carry a privileged directory role.

Related Services

Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management

Microsoft Entra ID Protection

Microsoft Entra Access Reviews

Microsoft Entra Conditional Access Design

Microsoft Entra ID Governance

Microsoft Entra