Top Use Cases & Trends in Machine & Workload Identity

As infrastructure becomes increasingly automated, the systems that deploy, manage, and scale it—CI/CD pipelines, service agents, orchestration tools—rely on a growing class of non-human identities (NHIs). These machine actors often operate with persistent credentials, excessive privileges, and limited visibility—leaving critical trust gaps in modern environments.

This session explores three high-impact use cases where addressing NHI is both urgent and achievable:

• CI/CD Pipeline Security: CI/CD platforms frequently use static secrets and over-permissioned service accounts to deploy infrastructure. We’ll walk through how to apply strong identity controls—short-lived credentials, just-in-time access, and session-level auditing—to harden these systems without slowing down delivery.
• Infrastructure-as-Code Workflows: Provisioning and orchestration tools often authenticate with long-lived credentials and execute plans with sweeping access. Learn how to introduce scoped, ephemeral identities into your automation flows—without disrupting developer velocity.
• Federated Workload Identity: Multi-cloud and hybrid services need to authenticate and authorize without relying on shared secrets or brittle one-off integrations. This talk will outline patterns for issuing verifiable, short-lived credentials across environments, enabling secure service-to-service trust without sacrificing velocity.

These use cases establish a clear model for managing non-human identity risk—one rooted in Zero Trust, built for automation, and grounded in real-world implementation.