Techniques for monitoring privileged users and detecting anomalous activities in a computing environment

In various implementations, a security management and control system for monitoring and management of security for cloud services can include automated techniques for identifying the privileged users of a given cloud service. In various examples, the security management and control system can obtain activity logs from the cloud service, where the activity logs record actions performed by users of an organization in using the cloud service. In various examples, the security management and control system can identify actions in the activity logs that are privileged with respect to the cloud service. In these and other examples, the security management and control system can use the actions in the activity log to identify privileged users. Once the privileged users are identified, the security management and control system can monitor the privileged users with a higher degree of scrutiny.