How to Secure Machines Without Secrets: Best Practices Guide

Read full article from Saviynt here: https://saviynt.com/blog/machines-without-secrets/?source=nhimg

Secretless operations is rapidly becoming the new best practice for securing machine identities in cloud and hybrid environments. While secrets management has long been the standard for handling API keys, tokens, and credentials, it still leaves organizations exposed to sprawl, hardcoded keys, and mismanagement. Secretless operations remove these risks entirely by eliminating static credentials and replacing them with identity-driven, real-time authentication.

Major cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP already support secretless methods, such as role-based access for EC2 instances or Kubernetes service accounts. These approaches allow workloads to authenticate automatically without storing secrets in configuration files or vaults, aligning with Zero Trust principles. Through federated SSO and workload identity federation, secretless models can even extend across multi-cloud and SaaS platforms.

Despite clear security benefits, adoption remains limited due to lack of awareness, configuration complexity, and uneven vendor support. However, with non-human identities (NHIs) growing at 25–50x the scale of human accounts, and regulators tightening compliance, organizations can no longer rely solely on traditional secrets management.

Best Practices

• Discover and clean up machine identities to remove unused or orphaned accounts.
• Adopt secretless operations wherever possible to reduce reliance on shared secrets.
• Maintain strong secrets management only where necessary, ensuring rotation, vaulting, and auditing.

By embedding secretless capabilities into NHI strategy, enterprises can strengthen machine identity hygiene, shrink their attack surface, and align with the future of identity-first security.

Bottom Line

Secretless isn’t just a technical optimization, it’s a foundational shift in how organizations secure the machines, applications, and agents powering modern infrastructure.