Identity Multi-Stored

Risk Category

Storage

Risk Description

Storing NHIs in multiple locations increases exposure and the likelihood of unauthorized access. Learn how to manage NHIs storage to prevent leaks.

Why It’s a Risk

Storing identities in different places increases the likelihood of unauthorized access, data breaches, or accidental exposure. Multi-stored identities are harder to secure and audit, leaving gaps in security visibility.

Likelihood of Occurrence

HIGH

Medium to High, especially in organizations with fragmented or decentralized identity storage practices.

Impact Level

MODERATE

Medium, as multiple storage locations increase the risk of exposure and misuse.

Mitigation Strategy

Identify and consolidate identities into secure, centralized management solutions such as secret managers and vaults. By reducing the number of storage locations, organizations can minimize exposure points. However, simply storing NHIs in a vault is not enough to fully secure them. While they ensure secure storage, they do not monitor how these identities are used outside the vault, detect misuse, or provide visibility into their full lifecycle.

This lack of oversight can result in compromised NHIs going undetected. To truly safeguard NHIs, integrate your vault strategy with a broader NHI security approach—one that includes continuous visibility, behavior monitoring, and context-aware analytics to track, secure and manage NHIs throughout their lifecycle. Implement a Zero Trust framework to ensure that, even if an identity is exposed, only authorized and verified consumers can access it.

Playbooks in Clutch

110

Applies for:

  • Cloud Service Provider

    AWSAzureGCP
  • Vault

    AWS Secrets ManagerGCP Secret ManagerHashicorp Vault
  • Source Manager

    BitbucketGithubGitlab
  • CI/CD

    CircleCIGithub ActionsJenkinsTeamcity
  • Password Manager

    1PasswordLastpass
  • EDR

    CrowdstrikeSentinelOneMicrosoft Defender
  • Data

    AWS RedShiftMongo DB AtlasMySQLPostgreSQLSnowflake
  • Network

    AkamaiCloudflare
  • PaaS

    AKSEKSGKEK8S
  • Collaboration

    Atlassian ConfluenceNotion
  • Project Management

    Atlassian Jira
  • Log Analytics

    DatadogElasticSplunk
  • IDP

    Google WorkspaceJumpCloudMicrosoft Entra IDOkta
  • CRM

    HubspotSalesforce
  • MDM

    IntuneJamf
  • IM

    Microsoft TeamsSnowflake
  • Ticketing

    ServiceNowZendesk
  • Automation

    TinesTorq
  • HRIS

    Bamboo HRHiBob
  • SIEM

    Exabeam (LogRhythm)Sumo Logic