In the 1990s, middleware was the muscle that made enterprise computing truly scalable. Before middleware, applications communicated with databases and back-end services directly using drivers like ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) or native SQL calls. This was simple but brittle, used shared secrets, and riddled with risks. It required developers to write custom code for every…
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Self Assessment: Modern Access Management Maturity
To conclude this 5 part series on the importance of comprehensive and deliberate NHI governance, we are pleased to share this self assessment framework to help organizations understand where they are in their access management maturity journey. In case you missed it, here’s what we’ve covered so far: 1. Outnumbered and underprotected: the hidden risk…
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New IAM Cybersecurity and PAM Tools Strategies for Higher Education
In the classroom, universities and colleges are looking towards the future with their curricula, stretching young minds around evolving concepts and advancements. The irony? Behind the scenes, these same institutions are often unprepared for the changes that developing technology brings to their campuses and networks. Recent digital disruptions, such as AI, have exposed the systems…
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Close the NHI Governance Gap
We’ve spent the better part of the last decade tightening our grip on workforce authentication. SSO is widespread. MFA is table stakes. Access reviews, offboarding workflows, and role-based policies are now standard practice. It took time and iteration, but we got there. Now it’s time to apply that same rigor to machine identities. The service…
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Start Governing NHIs by Managing Access, Not Credentials
This is part 3 in our series on non-human identity (NHI) governance. In this post, we focus on one of the most persistent risks in production infrastructure: static credentials and standing privilege. Static credentials are still at large in most environments and many enable dangerously over-permissioned and under-governed access to sensitive systems and data. API…
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Beyond Humans: Governing Machine Identity Access at Scale
In organizations today, every identity—human or machine—is a potential pivot point in an attack. Most progress in identity security has focused on authenticating people: SSO, MFA, admin lockdowns, automated provisioning. Important steps, but they only address half the identities accessing your systems. The other half—machines like CI/CD pipelines, service accounts, automation tools, AI agents, and…
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Outnumbered and Underprotected: The Hidden Risk of Non-Human Identities
Most security teams have focused their identity governance efforts on managing human access. You’ve got SSO in place. MFA is enforced. There’s a reasonably consistent process for onboarding and offboarding employees. You probably run access reviews on a quarterly basis and, if you’re further along, maybe you’ve deployed a PAM solution to protect privileged user…
