Workloads Shouldn’t Whisper: Ditching Secrets to Secure Non-Human Identities at Cloud Native Now 2024

Think back to a couple decades ago, when user passwords were jotted down on sticky notes and rarely changed. User identity evolved to password managers, MFA, SSO, IAM, and now Zero Trust. But we’re about to go through a déjà vu scenario with non-human identities, which are outpacing human ones by a staggering 45:1. The importance of managing secure workload-to-workload communication has never been more pronounced, as applications evolve from monolithic to dynamic and distributed. All this is driven by API-first and cloud-native environments, as well as serverless functions and microservices architectures.

So, how do we properly manage and secure workload interactions? Most importantly, how do we end our dependence on vulnerable secrets as the primary means to secure workload-to-workload access? This talk navigates past, present and future, preparing practitioners to thrive in a non-human identity-saturated world, free from the operational inefficiency and exposure risks of secrets.