Are Your Secrets Secure?

Secrets sprawl is a major hurdle when it comes to effectively handling cybersecurity. With an increasing number of non-human identities (NHIs) and secrets, it’s vital to have a robust management system in place. But what exactly are NHIs? Think of them as the machine identities used in cybersecurity, created by a “secret” – an encrypted password, token, or key – and the permissions granted by a destination server.

Securing Your Secrets

Securing NHIs and their secrets is an end-to-end process that involves securing the identities themselves and their access credentials. It also includes monitoring the behaviors of these identities. Sounds challenging? Fear not, as NHI management emphasizes a holistic approach, addressing every lifecycle stage from threats detection to remediation.

The stark contrast between NHI management and point solutions like secret scanners is the level of protection offered. While the latter serves only limited protection, the former gives a broader security coverage providing insights into ownership, permissions, usage patterns, and potential vulnerabilities. This context-aware security can bring significant benefits to your organization.

Benefits of NHI and Secrets Management

Reduced Risk

NHI and secrets management proactively identifies and mitigates security risks, reducing the probability of breaches and data leaks. This proactive approach can keep a check on potential vulnerabilities, ensuring that they are dealt with before they cause havoc.

Improved Compliance

By enforcing policy and tracking audit trials, an effective management system can help organizations adhere to regulatory requirements. This can make organizations breathe easy by ensuring that they are always on the right side of the law.

Increased Efficiency

By automating the management of NHIs and secrets, security teams can focus their energy on strategic initiatives. This automation not only streamlines the process but also significantly brings down the time taken to manage these identities.

Enhanced Visibility and Control

With a central view for access management and governance, NHI management offers greater visibility and control. It helps organizations keep track of who has access to what, increasing their governance capabilities.

Cost Savings

Automating secrets rotation and NHI decommissioning can bring down operational costs, thus contributing to overall cost savings.

Effective Management Techniques

With the rise in NHIs and the subsequent increase in secrets sprawl, it’s vital to adopt efficient management techniques to tackle the challenges that they pose. For example, implementing a strong policy for managing NHIs in healthcare can ensure that patient data remains secure at all times.

Similarly, integrating your NHI management with other systems can greatly increase its effectiveness. A case in point is the Entro-Wiz integration, which offers comprehensive visibility and vulnerability detection.

To battle secrets sprawl, it’s also crucial to take adequate measures for rotating secrets and decommissioning unused NHIs. Automating these processes can save valuable time and resources for your organization.

Are You Ready to Secure Your Secrets?

Managing secrets in the cloud does not have to be a daunting task. With the right strategy and tools in place, you can effectively tackle secrets sprawl and ensure the security of your organization. By incorporating NHI and secrets management into your cybersecurity strategy, you can significantly decrease the risk of security breaches and data leaks. Are you ready to secure your secrets?

Securing a Multitude of Non-Human Identities

Digital is littered with number of Non-Human Identities (NHIs). With this exponential growth comes an equally significant surge in secrets, each needing effectual protection to curb unauthorized access. Thankfully, robust management systems for NHIs and corresponding secrets now offer an adept mitigation solution against unauthorized access and potential breaches.

NHIs are integral to the security architecture of many enterprises. Their prevalence suggests a growing need for effective management techniques to ensure that they are not misused or exploited for malicious purposes. The nature of NHIs — being far more numerous and often longer-lived than human identities — makes their management all the more essential.

Scope of NHI and Secrets Management

Every modern organization employs a multitude of software applications, virtual machines (VMs) and cloud environments, each needing unique identities to function. These identities have exploded in number, surpassing human identities by far. Managing these NHIs is a critical yet colossal task, requiring dexterity and foolproof strategies.

Moreover, each identity holds ‘secrets’, an encrypted key that allows tit to interact on the network. The array of secrets sprawls further with every new NHI, forcing organizations to deal with the tumultuous task of managing not only the NHIs but their numerous secrets as well. Effective NHI and secrets management techniques streamline this process, reducing risks, improving compliance, increasing efficiency, enhancing visibility and control, and offering considerable cost savings.

Securing Cloud Environments

With a significant number of organizations moving their data, operations, and applications to the cloud, the need for securing NHIs and their secrets has tightened. The proper management of NHIs ensures – cloud-bound or otherwise – through their life cycle can limit the attack surface for potential breaches. The management should encompass integral stages like discovery, classification, threats detection, and remediation.

Industries Reaping the Benefits

The benefits of implementing NHI and secrets management are accessible and advantageous to a wide array of industries. Financial services, healthcare, travel and hospitality sectors, development operations (DevOps), and Security Operations Centers (SOC teams), among others, are witnessing a marked improvement in their cybersecurity posture through robust NHI management.

For instance, the healthcare industry, responsible for managing a treasure trove of critical patient data, can greatly reduce vulnerability by effectively managing NHIs. Through a strong policy for managing NHIs, a healthcare organization can fortify its defenses, ensuring the security and integrity of patient data.

While these sectors might differ in their operational practices, they invariably rely on secure cloud environments to hold, manage and process their data. The adoption of NHI and secrets management, therefore, is imperative to maintain the security of these cloud environments, effectively resisting breaches and data leaks.

The Way Forward

Implementing an effective strategy for managing NHIs and their secrets is no longer optional; it’s a necessity. By integrating NHI management with other systems, the organizations can significantly enhance their security schemes. Successful integrations like the Entro-Wiz cooperation stands as a testament to this, promoting comprehensive visibility and vulnerability detection.

The war against secrets sprawl is continuous, with effective measures for secrets rotation and decommissioning of unused NHIs being the need of the hour. Hence, automating these facets can lead to substantial time and resource savings.

Secure Your Secrets Now!

The management of your cloud-bound secrets need not be an overwhelming burden. With the correct strategy and platforms in deployment, tackling secrets sprawl and ensuring organizational security is a feasible task. By incorporating NHI and secrets management within your cyber-defensive blueprint, the risk of security breaches and data leaks can substantially decrease. So, are you ready to navigate NHIs and secure your secrets yet?

The post Key Approaches to Reduce Secrets Sprawl appeared first on Entro.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Entro authored by Alison Mack. Read the original post at: https://entro.security/key-approaches-to-reduce-secrets-sprawl/