Vendor Capability
Effective NHI lifecycle management is essential for securing non-human identities at all times. Organizations must identify and deactivate offboarded accounts with active access, monitor permission drift, and track role changes to prevent unauthorized access. Automated key and secret rotation, stale account deactivation, and policy-driven provisioning enhance security while reducing manual overhead. Additionally, alerting with prescriptive remediation steps and linking identities to their IaC artifacts ensures a fast and efficient response to security risks.
Questions to ask an NHI Provider
Does your solution detect and revoke access for offboarded accounts?
Can your platform track and alert on permission drift for NHIs over time to prevent excessive privilege?
Does your solution support automated key and secret rotation, and how do you handle stale service accounts?
Does your system generate and route prescriptive remediation instructions, and does it support Terraform, Pulumi, and CloudFormation for automated fixes?
Functionalities
Description
Auto assignment of ownership
Automatically identify human owners of any service account and detect involved infrastructures as a code (IaC), to ensure clear accountability. This improves visibility and operational efficiency and reduces time to mitigate security posture findings.
Help maintain least privilege
Suggest minimized scope of permissions, based on actual usage. This minimizes the risk of privilege escalation and unauthorized access.
Help storing in vault when needed
Ensure safe migration of secrets such as API keys, access keys, ssh-keys to a vault, by providing extensive context of relevant consumers and actual activity.
Help with key rotation and transition to short term credentials
Automate the rotation of keys and credentials at predefined intervals or based on security triggers, when consumed from vaults. Reduces the risk of long-lived secrets being compromised or misused.
Deprovision of an NHI
Ensures proper offboarding of NHIs by revoking permissions, deleting unused accounts, and cleaning up associated credentials. Prevents security risks from lingering or abandoned identities.