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Non-Human Identity (NHI) Protection and Governance

Non-human identities (NHIs) are the largest and fastest growing part of your identity attack surface, outnumbering human identities by an average of 17 to 1. Hackers are attacking NHIs because they know they can avoid human-focused security tools like MFA, so your security and compliance strategies must adapt to secure NHIs as first-class citizens.

Read the data sheet

Challenges
in securing NHIs

Over-Permissioning

Service accounts get created by developers and system owners without Security oversight, often with full admin rights for convenience and the intent to “clean it up later”- which rarely happens.

Unknown Blast Radius

Security teams are typically overwhelmed by alerts, without the context of the NHI’s potential blast radius and what an attacker would gain access to if the NHI were compromised. 

No Removal

NHIs and service accounts are often needed by highly technical users with deep access who may bypass the process to accelerate project timelines. More often, no process for NHIs exists, and unused or unnecessary accounts are rarely removed. 

Over-Permissioning

Service accounts get created by developers and system owners without Security oversight, often with full admin rights for convenience and the intent to “clean it up later”- which rarely happens.

Unknown Blast Radius

Security teams are typically overwhelmed by alerts, without the context of the NHI’s potential blast radius and what an attacker would gain access to if the NHI were compromised. 

No Removal

NHIs and service accounts are often needed by highly technical users with deep access who may bypass the process to accelerate project timelines. More often, no process for NHIs exists, and unused or unnecessary accounts are rarely removed. 

Posture &
Misconfigurations

Find and fix misconfigured cloud identities—human and non-human—that enable privilege escalation and lateral movement attacks.

Remove risky
access

Root out inactive, dormant and over-permissioned service accounts, RPA identities, and SaaS integrations.

Out-of-the-box
intelligence

Identify and fix your riskiest NHIs, like service accounts with admin privileges, before they can be exploited by an attacker.

Blast radius
analysis

Identify your high blast radius NHIs—those with broad access to cloud resources—who represent the greatest risk if compromised.

Intelligent access
for NHIs

Review access and govern NHIs

  • Review NHI accounts for Least Privilege permissions, correct ownership, and/or continued business need.
  • Understand deep context for NHI secrets with Last Used date, Last Rotated date and/or expiration date of certificates.
  • Prompt NHI owners to rotate keys, retire unneeded accounts, or migrate credentials to a secrets vault.

Automate the NHI lifecycle

  • Create, modify permissions, and remove AD Managed Service accounts.
  • Connect with employee or manager requests with Access Requests.
  • Integrate programmatically via API to enterprise applications with Access AuthZ.

Prioritize NHI remediation with risk scoring

  • Gain a quantified risk score for NHIs, keys, and secrets based on the breadth and depth of permissions and potential blast radius. 
  • Prioritize security alerts across your infrastructure based on the identity risk.
  • Integrate with third-party security tools like Crowdstrike.
Solutions

NHI use cases

NHIs impact all aspects of the enterprise. Veza helps you discover, secure, and provision NHIs wherever they are.

See all use cases
01

Discover NHIs

Find and label which accounts are non-human across 250+ integrations

Identify “clear” NHIs, like service principals and managed service accounts. Use search and filtering to find “likely” NHIs, for example via naming conventions or lack of MFA. Sync NHI labels in Veza with external sources like CMDBs.

02

Analyze permissions for least privilege

Understand permissions of NHI accounts/keys and right-size to business need

NHIs have been part of Veza’s data model and platform since day one. See all permissions to system resources across all Veza integrations.

03

Assign human owners

Enables governance and manual key rotation

Use Veza Tags to assign human owners to NHIs. Import ownership data from spreadsheets or other external sources.

04

Ensure key rotation

Identify login credentials and security/compliance risks.

Associate credentials with NHIs, and capture metadata from integrated systems, like “Time last rotated” and “Time last used”

05

Access Reviews

NHI owner-driven reviews

Assign reviews of all access to NHIs to their owners for certification. Identify and remove unneeded access.

06

Activity monitoring

Find dormant permissions to fix excess privilege

Know if NHIs are actually using their permissions in core platforms like Snowflake and AWS. Remove unused access.

07

Role recommendations

Create new NHIs that are right-sized to application needs

Optimize the NHI provisioning process to fix over-permissioning at the time of account creation. Eliminate “admin-level” permissions on NHIs where not needed.

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Ready to get started?

Identity tools leave doors open for attackers. Veza closes the doors by managing access across all systems. Modernize your identity governance and privileged access with Veza.
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