Identity In A Hyper-Connected World
Businesses are scaling faster than ever. Cloud, automation, APIs, IoT, and containers now define the digital landscape. As machines increasingly interact without human oversight, managing non-human identities (NHIs) is critical to keeping processes secure, reliable, and efficient.
Key Challenges with Non-Human-Identities
Service accounts, bots, and RPAs often outnumber human identities.
Often orphaned, over-permissioned, or unknown - and difficult to manage with manual, inconsistent processes.
Rarely reviewed or certified during access audits.
Prime targets for attackers seeking easy entry points.
Security Risks
Unmanaged or compromised NHIs can lead to significant security vulnerabilities, including data breaches and system disruptions.
Increased Attack Surface
The growing number of NHIs in modern IT environments expands the potential attack surface for cybercriminals.
Operational Efficiency
Effective management of NHIs is crucial for maintaining operational efficiency and ensuring the smooth functioning of automated processes.
Enhanced Security with Non-Human Identities
Workload Identity Federation
Replace static credentials with federated identities. Cloud providers and standards like SPIFFE enable workloads to authenticate without hardcoded secrets — but it’s only the first step.
Access Controls
Apply strict access controls and enforce least privilege to minimize unnecessary permissions.
Token-Based Architecture
Use workload identities to obtain OAuth tokens from an authorization server, like the Curity Identity Server. This provides your applications with dynamic, short-lived access credentials that systems can use to apply proper authorization policies.
Monitor and Audit Machine Interactions
Non-human identities shouldn’t be invisible. Using the same token system as humans makes it easy to log, trace, and alert on unusual machine activity.
Next steps
Ready to modernize IAM?
Start Today - Build security and improve ease of use to stay ahead of the competition.
