From Fragmented IAM to Unified Visibility: Monitoring AWS with NHI Governance

Read full article here: https://blog.gitguardian.com/nhi-dashboard-to-monitor-aws-iam/?utm_source=nhimg

Managing AWS IAM security has always been challenging, especially when it comes to tracking and controlling secrets. From API keys and tokens to SSH keys and certificates, secrets are often scattered across code repositories, configuration files, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes clusters, and cloud IAM systems. This fragmentation makes it nearly impossible to gain complete visibility and prevent leaks.

GitGuardian NHI Governance solves this by providing a centralized dashboard to continuously monitor Non-Human Identities (NHIs) across all your environments—including AWS IAM. By integrating NHI Governance with AWS IAM, organizations get real-time visibility into IAM roles, users, groups, and access keys, enriched with metadata about sensitivity, permissions, and risk exposure.

How the Integration Works

• Secure OIDC Authentication – Uses short-lived, temporary credentials (no long-lived secrets).
• Principle of Least Privilege – Read-only IAM policy ensures zero modification risks.
• Granular Trust Policy – Explicitly tied to your GitGuardian tenant, preventing third-party access.
• TLS-Encrypted Data Flow – Pull-based model ensures no public exposure of endpoints.

Once configured, NHI Governance automatically pulls AWS IAM data, analyzes permissions, highlights risky or long-lived credentials, and displays results in a single NHI inventory dashboard. Security teams can immediately see:

• Which IAM users or roles have excessive permissions
• Which API keys or secrets are long-lived and non-rotated
• Which identities pose the highest risk to cloud resources

Why It Matters

With this integration, AWS IAM is no longer a blind spot. Instead, it becomes part of a unified non-human identity security framework, where every secret and credential—across CI/CD, Kubernetes, and Cloud IAM—is tracked, audited, and monitored continuously.

Organizations gain:

• Centralized visibility into all NHIs
• Faster detection of risky IAM keys and misconfigurations
• Improved compliance with least-privilege policies
• Stronger cloud security posture with real-time monitoring

Conclusion

If AWS IAM secrets have been keeping you up at night, NHI Governance is your answer. By integrating GitGuardian NHI Governance with AWS IAM, you gain end-to-end control over non-human identities, reduce risks from leaked or mismanaged credentials, and strengthen your overall cloud security posture.

In today’s world of complex cloud environments, you can’t protect what you can’t see. With NHI Governance, every secret, every identity, and every IAM policy is finally visible in one place.