Key findings:
Non-Human Identities (NHIs), such as API keys, service accounts, and workload identities, now outnumber human identities significantly, expanding the attack surface and creating substantial operational risks.
Existing IAM, PAM, and vault tools fall short when it comes to managing the decentralized, automated, and short-lived nature of NHIs.
Organizations struggle with fragmented ownership, limited visibility, excessive permissions, and poor lifecycle management of NHIs, complicating compliance and security operations.
Recent breaches (e.g., Microsoft, Cloudflare, Sisense) illustrate NHIs are actively targeted and highlight critical security gaps.
Recommendations:
Define Clear NHI Requirements: Map all identity types, authentication methods, and critical use cases across your environment.
Focus on Visibility: Select solutions that continuously discover NHIs, leveraging identity access graphs to uncover privilege escalation paths, shadow identities, and dependencies.
Automate Observability and Ownership Attribution: Choose solutions that identify NHIs' ownership, linking identities to human owners or teams, while analyzing usage context for faster incident response and enhanced accountability.
Automate Lifecycle Management: Choose solutions that offer automated credential rotation, stale identity remediation, and integration with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to simplify management and reduce risks.
