Machine Identity

Discovery

The rapidly growing number of ungoverned machine identities are creating massive holes in an organization’s identity attack surface. By some estimates, these non-human identities are outnumbering standard user accounts by 50 to 1.

Problem

Machine identities cannot have the same security or governance policies as standard human accounts. Typically, these accounts have higher privileges than standard user accounts and utilize long-lived credentials, requiring unique password management, vaulting, and credential rotation policies.

Risk

The sheer number of machine identities make them prime targets because they are more likely to have privileged access rights.

Solution

Establish mechanisms for gaining visibility of all machine identities and maintain a real-time inventory of new and existing accounts in order to ensure coverage in policies within other security tools.

Challenges Discovering and Managing Machine Identities

Managing machine identities requires automation due to the growing number of non-human entities like service accounts, API keys, and IoT devices in dynamic cloud systems. Key strategies to tackle this:

Discover Identities: Use automated tools to find and map machine identities to human owners.
Monitor hygiene: Continuously check for policy violations and fix security risks in real time.
Manage Lifecycles: Automatically detect, classify, and rotate machine credentials.
Cross-Platform Data Normalization: Create a consistent identity data layer to manage information across diverse systems with different data schemas.
Secure Credentials: Rotate secrets, use just-in-time access, and audit to prevent exposure.

Gain visibility and control of all of every machine identity

Get Control of Machine Identities

Uncover shadow machine accounts that are not managed by your PAM vault or IGA policies, ensuring applicable governance policies are applied. Then utilize integrations to apply security policies that are specific to machine identities with the understanding that MFA cannot be utilized because no human is involved in approving authentication requests.

Ensure Policies Specific to Non-Human Accounts Are Applied

Guarantee total coverage of any credential type across on-premise, SaaS, custom identity system and application. Manage and vault any every password, certificate, SSH key, or security key/token with the vault you already own.

Associate Every Machine Identity With A Human Owner

Guarantee complete identity lifecycle governance by automatically correlating multiple machine accounts to a single human identity so that the applicable governance policies can be approved by the human owner of machine accounts.

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