Understanding Aembit

Understanding Aembit

The Okta for Non-Human Identities

Aembit is a Non-Human Identity (NHI) and access management platform designed to handle secure machine-to-machine interactions across multi-cloud, SaaS, and on-premise environments. Often referred to as “Okta for Non-Human Identities”, Aembit streamlines the enforcement of machine identities and their access rights, ensuring secure and automated access without requiring manual intervention from developers or IT teams.

Aembit cryptographically verifies the identities of workloads using “trust providers,” leveraging secretless identity tokens from platforms like AWS, GCP, or on-prem systems. Further, enforcing policies set by the administrator, Aembit grants access and then injects a short-lived credential directly into the access request. This shift from long-lived credentials to dynamic, short-term tokens with just-in-time delivery enables organizations to automate credential management, and eliminate the need for workload NHIs to store credentials. This significantly enhances security and operational efficiency. Aembit’s conditional access policies ensure that workloads access resources only under predefined circumstances, such as meeting compliance & security posture requirements defined by, for example, Crowdstrike or Wiz.

Use Cases

Aembit’s solutions are used in securing sensitive databases (e.g., Snowflake), CI/CD systems, AI agents and LLMs, and enabling zero-trust access for machine workloads. Its approach eliminates secrets in CI/CD pipelines and prevents credential reuse, addressing a critical challenge for organizations managing multi-cloud infrastructures. It also prevents humans from touching and managing privileged machine credentials through no-code auth. The platform’s flexibility allows companies to focus on specific pain points, whether that’s sensitive data protection, secure CI/CD processes, or multi-cloud federation.

Aembit’s Competitive Advantage

Aembit’s approach combines identity federation with policy-based access control, securing the rapidly expanding web of non-human identities (e.g., service accounts, API keys, and microservices). This platform offers clear advantages over traditional cloud IAM systems and secrets managers like HashiCorp Vault, which often lack the ability to manage conditional access and centralized policies for machine-to-machine interactions.

1. Federating Identities Across Environments: Aembit can federate identities across any infrastructure—AWS, GCP, Azure, on-premise, or SaaS applications—providing real-time, cryptographically verified identities. This "secret-less" access model reduces the security risks associated with long-lived credentials.

2. Automated Credential Management: Aembit’s automation capabilities streamline the credential management process, removing manual handling and mitigating human error. This helps companies eliminate the complexities of credential injection, significantly improving security posture.

3. Developer-Friendly, No-Code Integration: Aembit’s no-code implementation allows developers to continue their workflows without modifications, as the platform manages credentials and policies behind the scenes. This flexibility enables organizations to adopt Aembit without disrupting existing development processes, and use Aembit when organizations are running software from third party providers.

4. Seamless Integration with Existing Vaults: Aembit integrates with legacy systems like CyberArk and provides the ability to mint on-demand, short-term tokens. This capability ensures smooth policy enforcement without forcing companies to rip and replace their existing infrastructure.

Discussion on some approaches used and how Aembit differs

It is popularly known that some companies might use some form of Cloud IAM and secrets managers (e.g., HashiCorp Vault), but they have their limitations in managing modern, distributed infrastructures. These tools are often designed to manage static credentials within specific environments (such as AWS or GCP), but they struggle to handle the cross-environment communication required in multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructures. For instance, Cloud IAM systems are inward-looking, meaning they work well within their native environments but create gaps when trying to connect to external systems, SaaS applications, or other cloud providers. Similarly, secrets managers like CyberArk and HashiCorp are built to store secrets securely but lack the conditional access, real-time policy enforcement, and identity federation required for non-human identity (NHI) security in distributed environments.

Aembit addresses these shortcomings by offering automation and federation across multi-cloud distributed environments. Unlike secrets managers, Aembit can retrieve credentials from multiple environments while also acting as a policy engine to ensure that every access request is validated in real-time using conditional access checks. As discussed, Aembit emphasizes a secret-less architecture, where short-lived tokens replace long-lived credentials, reducing the risk of breaches. It’s important to note that Aembit integrates smoothly with existing vaults like CyberArk and HashiCorp, allowing companies to retain their infrastructure while benefiting from Aembit’s advanced policy control and automation features. This allows organizations to transition to a secret-less model without ripping out their current systems.

Aembit’s vision is to lead the shift towards secret-less architectures, where credentials are dynamically minted on demand, reducing the need for legacy vaults. As more organizations embrace multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures, Aembit can solve the NHI security access management, offering a unified solution for companies struggling with both legacy systems and cloud-native deployments.