Gartner’s Leaders’ Guide to Modern Machine IAM
Gartner Recognizes Astrix in Its First Leaders’ Guide for Machine Identity and Access Management. Continue reading to learn why this marks a turning point for machine IAM and how Astrix is helping define the category.
A Milestone for the Machine IAM Market
Gartner has published its first dedicated reports on Machine Identity and Access Management (Machine IAM), marking a significant development in how organizations manage and secure nonhuman identities (NHIs). The publication of these resources—“Leaders’ Guide to Modern Machine IAM” and “Innovation Insight: Improve Security With Machine IAM”—signals a formal acknowledgment of the machine IAM space as a critical and distinct area within the broader IAM landscape.
As the number of machine identities—such as workloads, APIs, scripts, containers, and SaaS integrations—continues to grow exponentially, security leaders are facing increased complexity and risk in managing machine-to-machine access. These new reports provide clarity on the scope of the problem and offer guidance on modernizing IAM programs accordingly.
Astrix Security is featured in both reports for its role in Workload Identity Management—a category Gartner defines as essential for discovering, governing, and securing machine identities across hybrid and cloud-native environments.
Machine IAM: A Fast-Growing, Underdeveloped Priority
Gartner identifies machine IAM as one of the least mature areas within most IAM programs, despite being one of the fastest growing in scale and risk exposure. The shift toward automation, cloud adoption, and nonhuman actors has outpaced the capabilities of traditional IAM frameworks designed for human users.
“Machine identities significantly outnumber human identities, and this disparity is only expected to increase with the continued growth of cloud usage, automation, AI, integrations and bots.”
(Innovation Insight: Improve Security With Machine IAM, March 2025)
Without clear governance and visibility, organizations face mounting challenges: unmanaged service accounts, hardcoded credentials, overprivileged bots, and API sprawl.
Key Themes in Gartner’s Leader’s Guide to Machine IAM
The reports provide actionable guidance for maturing machine IAM capabilities, focusing on:
- Replacing static service accounts with dynamic, just-in-time machine identities
- Establishing centralized governance models for nonhuman identities
- Implementing continuous discovery and monitoring of credentials and access
- Using policy-driven trust mechanisms for machine-to-machine communication
- Automating secrets rotation, certificate lifecycle management, and credential issuance
Gartner emphasizes that effective machine IAM programs should be integrated within the broader IAM strategy and must be aligned with DevOps, cloud, and application development functions.
Technology Landscape and Astrix’s Position
In Gartner’s analysis of the Machine Identity and Access Management (IAM) space, various supporting technologies are highlighted—from secrets management and certificate lifecycle automation to workload access control. However, the most critical and strategic foundation is Workload identity management tools—a category where Astrix is recognized and uniquely positioned.
As organizations scale cloud infrastructure, adopt SaaS, and integrate automation, they encounter an explosion of machine identities: service accounts, tokens, API keys, OAuth apps, webhooks, and AI agents. Traditional IAM solutions often lack the visibility, governance, and security controls necessary to secure and manage these entities effectively. Astrix provides a comprehensive platform built specifically for modern machine IAM, addressing the full lifecycle of NHIs across hybrid environments.
How Astrix Addresses NHI Challenges
- Comprehensive Discovery and Inventory
Astrix offers real-time discovery of all non-human identities, including service accounts, secrets, API keys, OAuth apps, IAM roles, certificates, webhooks, and AI agents. This spans across SaaS, IaaS/PaaS, on-premises, and secret managers, ensuring dynamic inventory updates that reflect provisioning and revocation events. - Orphaned Identity Detection The platform continuously monitors identity usage and status, identifying abandoned or orphaned credentials, particularly those created by former employees. This proactive approach helps eliminate blind spots and reduces long-term access risks.
- Ownership and Accountability Enforcement
Each NHI is enriched with context—linking it to its human creator, environment, vendor, and access patterns. Astrix automates attestation workflows to ensure every identity has an accountable owner and a validated purpose, akin to user access reviews but tailored for machine entities. - Behavioral Analysis and Threat Detection
Through NHI-specific threat detection, Astrix establishes baselines for normal activity and flags deviations in real-time. It correlates actions across multiple NHIs to detect potential hijacking, lateral movement, or abuse, utilizing a threat engine designed specifically for machine identity activity. - Over-Permission and Secret Exposure Management
Astrix identifies over-privileged NHIs and prioritizes them by contextual risk. It scans environments—including CI/CD pipelines and vaults—for exposed credentials and supports secure rotation and least-privilege enforcement without operational disruption. - Remediation and Response Automation
The platform integrates with collaboration and incident tools like Slack and Jira to enable owner-driven or automated remediation. Security issues can be resolved via orchestrated workflows or one-click actions, significantly reducing time-to-fix and alert fatigue.
With this end-to-end approach, Astrix empowers security and identity teams with the context, automation, and control needed to manage machine access at scale—without disrupting development or operations.
See Astrix in action or request a live demo to learn how we help organizations secure machine-to-machine access effectively.
