Infrastructure access has always been about trust. For people, we issue accounts, enforce MFA, and track activity. But non-human identities—service accounts, bots, workloads, scripts, CI/CD pipelines—are now touching more infrastructure than human users ever will. They create and destroy resources. They push code to production. They read and write sensitive databases. And too often, they do it with static, overpowered credentials no one is watching.
Non-human identities are the hidden spine of modern infrastructure. They deploy containers, scale clusters, connect microservices, and bridge APIs. Each one represents a unique security perimeter. Without real control, they become an uncontrolled attack surface—bigger and harder to manage than any employee directory. Attackers know this, and they go after tokens, keys, and secrets the moment they get inside a network.
The old model of infrastructure access doesn’t fit. SSH keys sitting in repos. Long-lived API tokens passed between services. Unrotated cloud IAM credentials hardcoded into code. Every one of these is a weakness waiting to be exploited. You need a way to issue, manage, and expire credentials for non-human entities with the same rigor you apply to humans—without adding friction that breaks automation.
Strong infrastructure access for non-human identities means: