Security teams have spent years securing human identities with privileged access management (PAM) programs and ensuring the principle of least privilege is adhered to throughout the enterprise. But in recent years, organizations have experienced an explosion of non-human identities, thanks to large shifts like digital transformation efforts and the use of automation tools and processes. Today’s enterprises are powered by a wide variety of machine identities, from microservices running in the cloud and unattended bots in robotic process automation (RPA) workloads to static or mainframe applications that still sit on-premises. These non-human identities rely on secrets (passwords, SSH keys, API keys and more) to access the critical systems needed to do their jobs.
As the number of non-human identities and secrets to protect grows exponentially, security teams must expand their PAM programs to secure all elements of privileged access — and that means protecting human and non-human identities — without slowing down development teams or delaying deployments. To keep up with the rapid pace of development, security and operations teams must work together to ensure that secrets management processes for non-human identities are scalable, automated, don’t interfere with mission-critical applications’ availability and are centralized to reduce the issue of islands of security and vault sprawl.
