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Managing Non-Human Identities & Secrets

 Non‑human identities (NHIs), service accounts, CI/CD runners, containers, and integrations need secrets (API keys, tokens, passwords, certificates) to authenticate to systems. When those secrets are hardcoded, shared across environments, or rarely rotated, a single leak can become an incident. 

 

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Secrets and Non-human Identity

Problems

API’s and Passwords exposed in code

Solution

Safely storing and accessing sensitive information like API keys or passwords.

Our Vendors of Choice

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Start by...

centralising secrets and access policies. HashiCorp Vault and Akeyless enables teams to store, access, rotate, and distribute secrets programmatically, including dynamic, short lived credentials with expiration and automated rotation.

Akeyless additionally adds a cloud native approach to secrets and NHI governance, unifying secrets management with workload identity federation and options for ephemeral/secret less access across cloud and hybrid environments.  

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Finally...

reduce “secret sprawl” at the source with GitGuardian: it scans repositories for exposed API keys, database credentials, and certificates so teams can remediate before they ship.

This approach supports least privilege access and gives teams one place to enforce policy and audit usage at scale across dev, test, and production.

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Is this Relevant to you?

Industry

Which of my customers care about securing Codebase, Repo's & Images? Organisations with over 50 Developers typically:

Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYFinancial services
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYHealthcare
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYPublic sector
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYTelecommunications
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYEnergy
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYRetail/Ecommerce
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYTechnology/SaaS/ISVs
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYTransportation/Logistics

Roles

Who cares about securing Codebase, Repo's & Images?

Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYPlatform Engineering Manager
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYDeveloper Platform Owner
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYDevOps/DevSecOps Lead
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYIdentity & Access Management Lead
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYCloud Security Architect
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYApplication Security (AppSec) Lead
Nuaware_Icon_Turq_ONLYCISO/Head of Security

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Key Discovery Questions 

Answering these questions helps uncover risks and align your strategy with best practices in DevSecOps.
 

1

 Where are secrets currently stored and delivered today? (code, CI/CD variables, cloud secret managers, vaults, spreadsheets)

2

 How do your non‑human identities authenticate? (service accounts, pipelines, workloads), and who owns that lifecycle?

3

 How often do you rotate API keys/tokens/certificates? and is rotation automated or manual?

4

 Have you had any recent incidents or near misses with leaked credentials, and do you scan repos and pulls for hardcoded secrets?

5

 Do you have audit ready visibility into who/what accessed which secrets, from dev through production and can you prove it for compliance?

 

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Continue Your Journey

Reach out to our team to discuss how we can help secure your software supply chain. Alternatively, return to our Secure Code-to-Cloud page to explore more topics, problem domains, and discover how our expertise addresses them.
 

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