Privileged Access Management (PAM) is the cornerstone of cybersecurity strategy. PAM traditionally focused on IT users with elevated access, and while PAM remains core, the focus has shifted to securing all identities that have privilege, not just a small group of trusted administrators.
The identity attack surface is diverse and expanding – across on-prem, cloud, and SaaS environments. Understanding the different types of identities operating in your organization is essential to reducing risk, as identity-related data breaches cost more than the typical cyber incident.
Identity provisioning is decentralized among multiple identity directories and resources, which obscures your visibility and limits oversight. It’s easy for identities to have excess permissions and become orphaned and unmanaged.
You need to understand the full picture of how identities move in and out of a porous perimeter. Only then can you adequately protect sensitive systems and data.
IT admin identities include:
IT admin identities have a temporary or permanently high level of access to perform a job or task, which increases risk. An IT admin in a rush could skirt your central vault and established processes and instead create a backdoor account for easy access. A nefarious IT admin could cause a lot of damage and cover their tracks.
Traditionally, these users have shared privileged accounts used to unlock access, which makes it impossible to tell which individual on the team has accessed a system or what changes they made. Especially if your organization outsources IT or security operations to an MSSP or other service provider, it’s easy to lose oversight of IT admin behavior.
Instead, an identity-based system leverages the unique identity of the IT admin, as managed by your Active Directory, federated identity, or other identity management system. IT admins may have one identity they use for high-risk work such as infrastructure updates, and another they use for their day-to-day activities, such as email communication.
Delinea helps secure IT admin identities with:
Learn more about IT admin identities and how to secure them.
Human error remains a top breach vector for workforce identities. The rise in remote work increases exposure to identity-based attacks. These workforce identities are prime targets for ransomware and need security controls to ensure identity hygiene, limit access, and ensure ongoing oversight.
Users of critical business applications such as ERP, HR, and CRM solutions can easily become shadow IT as SaaS tools are increasingly licensed and managed by application owners rather than IT. Business applications have a wide variety of security roles and structures that are often quite broad and likely don’t easily align with your other identity management processes.
Workforce identities typically get access provisioned during onboarding and are managed via a Joiner, Mover, Leaver process, typically involving manual access reviews and access certification review campaigns.
81% of employers believe that their former employees have access to company files
Because workforce identities are widely distributed, they can get forgotten after a team member leaves. Beyond Identity estimates that 81% of employers believe that their former employees still have access to company files after leaving.
In addition to business application access, workforce identities carry risk if they retain local administrative rights on their personal workstations. These local admin rights are an attractive target for malicious hackers who gain access via malware targeted to business users.
Delinea helps secure workforce identities with:
Learn more about workforce identities and how to secure them.
Machine identities are digital identities of devices and workloads.
These include:
Machine identities are used to interact with systems, exchange data, and perform tasks autonomously, via:
Machine identities often have short lifespans and require frequent updates, renewals, or deactivations. Without proper human oversight, they can be provisioned incorrectly and easily become orphaned. Often, users don’t know what access machine identities need. As a result, they enable access to more data and business systems than they need to accomplish their goals.
To gain privileged access, machine identities leverage credentials such as SSH keys, API keys, certificates, and OAuth tokens. The credentials associated with machine identities must be managed centrally for ongoing oversight, just as passwords are.
AI identities are a high-risk type of machine identity.
AI models can execute tasks, interact with systems, and even create and manage credentials, making them a major risk if compromised. The rise of Agentic AI—AI systems capable of making independent decisions—is increasing the use of machine identities and expanding the attack surface at many organizations.
With the right access, these powerful tools can be weaponized. Attackers can leverage AI agents to mix harmful or deceptive data into datasets used to train a machine learning model. If poisoned, AI agents could be manipulated to bypass security controls, escalate privileges, or exfiltrate data.
Delinea helps secure machine identities by:
Learn more about machine and AI identities and how to secure them.
Developers need access to specific systems and data to do their jobs. For example, they may have access to critical systems in the CI/CD process, and dev environments separate from production.
Often, developers include remote third parties or short-term hires to fill a skills gap or quickly launch a specific product. They need to move fast and don’t want to be dependent on anyone else or wait for tickets to be processed to receive the permissions they need.
While they dislike the burden of security tools, developers are more amenable to working with them if they feel more cloud native and meet their need for speed.
Delinea helps secure developer identities by:
Learn more about developer identities and how to secure them.
Organizations struggle to ensure all these identity types are managed securely. A survey from Dimensional Research found the average company uses more than 25 different systems for identity management.
Relying on disconnected solutions for identity security—or worse, manual processes—is a sure path to creating vulnerabilities in your attack surface.
You can secure all four identity types in a connected ecosystem.
The Delinea Identity Security Platform improves identity security by eliminating these silos. You can discover all identities, assign appropriate access levels, detect irregularities, and immediately respond to identity threats in real-time. You can secure each identity with seamless, intelligent, centralized authorization at every interaction, without sacrificing productivity.
Delinea built the Platform to address six key components of a successful identity security strategy.
You can apply these six across all identity types, addressing key use cases: