What is security lifecycle management?

The average corporate network hosts thousands—if not tens of thousands—of identities, ranging from human users (developers and other stakeholders) to nonhuman identities (such as AI agents, devices, workloads and services). This population is dynamic. Human users join, leave and change roles frequently. New nonhuman identities appear continuously as infrastructure is provisioned, scaled and decommissioned—particularly in cloud-native and DevOps contexts, where the CI/CD pipeline and automated workflows routinely spin up short-lived services and workloads.

Each identity is a potential vulnerability. Users can maliciously or negligently misuse their privileges, becoming insider threats. Threat actors can take over human and nonhuman identities by using stolen credentials and brute-force attacks to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems.

In fact, identity-based attacks—where hackers abuse valid account credentials to break into a network—are one of the most common cyberattack methods. They account for 30% of data breaches recorded in the IBM X-Force® Threat Intelligence Index.

Security lifecycle management aims to shrink the identity attack surface and close security gaps by centralizing the management of these identities and their associated permissions and credentials under a single platform or set of closely integrated tools. Security lifecycle management automates core cybersecurity functions—such as credential creation and rotation, account provisioning and deprovisioning and security policy enforcement—to strengthen access controls and secrets management without disrupting business-critical workflows.

Security lifecycle management uses a platform or set of integrated tools to centrally oversee and automate key cybersecurity functions, especially those functions pertaining to account security, credential management and user access permissions.

Some of the core functions of security lifecycle management include identity management, secrets management and secure networking.

Security lifecycle management can automate identity and access management (IAM) workflows for both human and nonhuman identities, such as:

• Onboarding new users and entities, including creating accounts and assigning permissions.
  
  
• Adjusting users’ and entities’ privileges as their roles change over time.
  
  
• Enforcing security policies through measures such as role-based access controls (RBAC), continuous authentication and authorization and just-in-time privileges.
  
  
• Continuously monitoring user activity through session recording.
  
  
• Deprovisioning identities when users leave or services are retired.

In addition to protecting identities, security lifecycle management also helps protect the credentials associated with those identities. It can automate important credential management and secrets management functions, such as:

• Creating strong credentials for new human and nonhuman identities, including certificates, API keys, passwords and tokens.
  
  
• Rotating credentials regularly.
  
  
• Storing high-value credentials—such as administrative and service account credentials that grant highly privileged access to sensitive information and systems—in credential vaults. Vaults are, in turn, protected by encryption and strong authentication measures—such as multifactor authentication (MFA)—to help ensure that only authorized users can access these credentials when needed.
  
  
• Replacing persistent credentials with temporary or just-in-time credentials.
  
  
• Automatically scanning for and remediating exposed secrets stored in code, repositories, collaboration platforms, developer tools or other locations.

Some security lifecycle management tools also support credential injection, an authentication process in which users never need to handle credentials directly. Instead, credentials are fed from secure vaults to the appropriate services on the user’s behalf, reducing the risks of exposure or theft.

Building on the protection of identities and credentials, security lifecycle management also helps facilitate secure connection and communication between identities—particularly between services.

Security lifecycle management tools often provide:

• A centralized source of truth for service identities, enabling service discovery and tracking, along with real-time information on a service’s health and other attributes.
  
  
• Identity-based connections, including service-to-service encryption, continuous authentication and attribute-based authorization. Every access request is vetted, and services are granted access based on their attributes rather than network location.
  
  
• Automated provisioning of secure network infrastructure, such as service meshes, load balancers, firewalls and gateways. Secure communication is established, updated and decommissioned automatically as services are created, scaled or retired.

While security lifecycle management usually focuses on identities, credentials, services and software infrastructure, it can sometimes involve device management functions. Examples include automated patching for workstations and mobile devices, hardware certificate management and continuous monitoring and remediation for on-premises security systems, such as cameras and physical access controls.

By centralizing and automating core IAM and secrets management functions, security lifecycle management helps security teams gain more visibility into and control over human users and nonhuman identities. Centralization and automation can help streamline activity monitoring, access controls and policy enforcement, reducing the risks of identity-based attacks and other security incidents and cyberthreats.

In complex IT systems, human and nonhuman identities can exist on—and move between—on-premises, remote and cloud infrastructure. The distributed nature of these networks makes it hard for security teams to track what each identity is doing. Moreover, resources are often dynamic and ephemeral in DevOps pipelines. New nonhuman identities can be introduced to a system, access secure information and disappear all before the security team even knows they’re there. As a result, policy enforcement struggles, and security risks increase.

In the absence of secure management and centralized oversight, individual users might not follow best practices for security hygiene. They might set weak passwords and reuse them. They might neglect to enable MFA. DevOps pipelines are notoriously prone to secret sprawl, the proliferation of unmanaged secrets through repos, code, databases and elsewhere, leaving them open to potential threats.

App sprawl—bringing apps into an ecosystem without centralized management, particularly apps whose authentication and authorization functions do not integrate with existing IAM systems—also introduces issues. When separate apps have separate identity directories, permissions settings and credentials, it becomes all too easy for important security activities—such as privilege audits and deprovisioning—to slip through the cracks.

Security lifecycle management can help minimize the security threats posed by weak identity, access and credential controls by centralizing management and automating core processes.

Managing all identities—human and nonhuman—in one system helps security teams set more consistent access policies. Automated provisioning and deprovisioning help ensure these policies are applied in a timely, standardized way.

Automated credential management helps ensure that strong credentials are used, secured and rotated properly, while credential detection tools can help find unmanaged and unsecured secrets for remediation.

With session recording, security teams can track everything users do, streamlining both policy enforcement and incident response. If and when a security breaches occurs, investigators can use the recording to see what hackers did with a compromised account.

Finally, securing service-to-service connections helps address one of the most significant vulnerabilities in the software supply chain: the connections between components in a system.

As IBM Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor Jeff Crume said on the Security Intelligence podcast :

“Some of the biggest vulnerabilities happen in those bridge points between two different things where the interfaces are. My component may be perfect, and your component may be perfect, but our interface is not. And of course, the bad guys will go for wherever the weak spots are.”

In short, a comprehensive approach to security lifecycle management can give an organization a single system of record for human and nonhuman identities, credentials and permissions across the entire ecosystem, supporting zero trust and the principle of least privilege.

It is important to note, too, that security lifecycle management tools and practices are meant to support the quick, innovative activity of DevOps pipelines. In fact, they can help optimize these processes by taking credential management entirely out of developers’ hands. By automatically creating, storing, rotating and protecting secrets, security lifecycle management can secure the IT ecosystem without getting in the way.