Cloud-Based Identity and Access Management for Strengthening Enterprise Cyber Resilience in Saudi Arabia

Saudi companies are transferring their applications, data, collaboration platforms, and key business processes into public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. While this shift enhances scalability and service agility, it also undermines the assumption that users, devices, and workloads can be trusted since they come from an internal network. As a result, identity and access management now serves as a means of achieving cyber resilience rather than remaining just an administrative task. This report brings together research that was published between 2020 and 2025 on cloud identity management, multifactor authentication, federated identity, attribute-based authorization, zero-trust access, identity-as-a-service, continuous monitoring, and resilient cloud security. Its objective is to examine how identity-focused controls can help reduce unauthorized access, restrict lateral movement, ensure service continuity, and speed up recovery in Saudi enterprise settings that are in line with Vision 2030. In order to achieve this, a structured integrative review was carried out, selecting thirty publications verified by DOI and directly relevant to the subject, with clear methodological standards and practical applicability to distributed enterprise systems. The synthesis indicates that resilient IAM relies on six interdependent capabilities: authoritative management of the identity lifecycle, phishing-resistant authentication, context-aware authorization, disciplined handling of privileged access, continuous telemetry, and automated revocation and recovery. Protection provided by isolated controls is very limited if problems such as entitlement drift, weaknesses in federation, compromised end points, or out-of-date credentials are not dealt with. The paper puts forward an identity-centric cloud cyber-resilience framework which connects preventive access decisions with detection, response, recovery, and governance. For Saudi enterprises, the main consequence is that cloud IAM should be treated as a continuously assured control plane that links security architecture, regulatory compliance, workforce practices, and operational resilience rather than being viewed merely as a login service.