Building an NHI Security Program with Astrix’s Customer Success Team: Part 1

When organizations begin their journey with Astrix, our customer success team, made up of NHI Security experts, guides them every step of the way. The first step is choosing the right motivation for the program:

• NHI Security Reducing your attack surface by uncovering and mitigating risky non-human identities (NHIs)
  
• NHI Management Establishing strong lifecycle controls and enforcing best practices (we’ll cover this in Part 2)

This article focuses on the NHI Security path and outlines how Astrix’s Customer Success team partners with customers to build a solid foundation, from initial visibility to real-time threat detection and automated secret scanning.

The goal: go from 0 to operational in weeks, not months, with a tailored program that aligns with your environment and resource capacity.

Step 1: Define scope and prioritize environments

A key early decision is which environments to bring into scope and in what order. Most teams choose from:

• SaaS (e.g. Google Workspace, GitHub, Slack)
  
• IaaS (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP)
  
• On-Prem

Rather than tackling everything at once, our Customer Success team helps you prioritize based on risk, exposure, and ease of integration. Early focus areas often include external-facing apps, third-party integrations, or corporate SaaS platforms where NHIs proliferate quickly.

Step 2: Build your NHI posture

This is where visibility and governance begin.

Our Customer Success team guides you through:

• Platform integration Start by connecting Astrix to your target environments to begin monitoring NHI activity.
  
• SIEM integration (minimal config) At first, forward only critical-risk findings to your SIEM. This prevents noise and ensures your detection program starts strong. (Full integration comes later.)
  
• Define your first project Examples include reviewing NHIs in corporate SaaS apps or mapping all third-party OAuth tokens.
  
• Create a dedicated dashboard Tailored to your project, this becomes your command center.
  
• Manual review Understand the nuances of each environment and define remediation workflows that make sense for your org.
  
• Integrate with external tools Connect Astrix with systems like Jira, Slack, or SOAR to support your processes.
  
• Build initial workflows Use Astrix’s out-of-the-box automations or set up flows via external tools.

Outcome: Within 1–2 weeks (with dedicated resourcing), customers typically go from 0 to 1 with manual workflows in place, reporting meaningful posture improvements within 3 months.

Step 3: Operationalize threat detection

With posture visibility in place, we move into real-time protection.

• SIEM connection Should be active from day one. Alerts related to high-risk behavior go straight to the Incident Response (IR) team.
  
• SLA definition During onboarding, we help define SLAs based on alert type, confidence level, and business impact.
  
• Playbook creation Build a detection-and-response loop using Astrix automations and your SOAR.
  
• Alert routing Astrix triggers the SOAR, which can then notify PagerDuty, Slack, or ticketing tools as needed.
  
• Workflow operationalization We help align your response time to SLA targets – often reducing time-to-response from 75 hours to under 10.

Outcome: Within 2 weeks, most customers have a viable detection and response workflow in place that routes and addresses real threats based on confidence and priority.

Step 4: Expand into secret scanning

This is where deeper hygiene meets proactive protection.

• Connect to leakage-prone environments Source code repos, SaaS tools, CI/CD pipelines, etc.
  
• Use secret scanning dashboards Identify the most problematic environments and human contributors.
  
• Drive cleanup with context Leverage Astrix’s chatbot to guide users through fixing exposed secrets.
  
• Design future workflows Triage based on secret type and validity. For example: auto-delete the secret + notify the human on leakage.

Outcome: Critical secrets can be cleaned up immediately. Within 30 days, organizations have workflows in place to detect and resolve future exposures quickly and consistently.

A clear plan, backed by experts

Astrix doesn’t just provide a platform – we help you build an NHI security program. Our Customer Success team brings deep technical expertise, hands-on guidance, and real-world knowledge of what works across complex environments.

This is Part 1 of your NHI journey. Once the security foundation is in place, Part 2 will focus on operationalizing management – from enforcing best practices to scaling governance.

Stay tuned.