The lifecycle is the security model
Non-human identity failures often come from lifecycle gaps: identities get created casually, reused across environments, never rotated, and never deprovisioned. A lifecycle approach treats identities like managed assets with owners, controls, and end-of-life procedures.
Inventory: you can’t secure what you can’t name
Start with an inventory of identities: services, jobs, runners, bots, certificates, API keys, cloud roles, database users. Capture metadata: owner team, environment, purpose, issuance method, rotation policy, and dependency graph (what it can access).
Provisioning: make the secure path the easiest path
Provision identities through standardized workflows (self-service with guardrails) so teams don’t resort to copy-pasting keys. Use templates that encode least privilege, environment scoping, and required claims/audiences.
Rotation: design for frequent change
Rotation should be routine, automated, and low-drama. If rotation is painful, it won’t happen. Short TTL credentials and automated renewal shift the burden away from “rotate the secret everywhere” toward “renew continuously.” (See Dynamic Secrets and Credential Issuance.)
Review and recertification: prevent permission drift
Over time, identities accumulate permissions “just in case.” Establish periodic access reviews for high-privilege identities (CI deployers, IaC appliers, break-glass roles) and require justification for privileged scopes.
Deprovisioning: the most neglected phase
When a service is retired, a repo archived, or a pipeline replaced, associated identities must be revoked and removed. Build deprovisioning hooks into your SDLC: delete the identity when the service is deleted, and alert on identities unused past a threshold.
Incident response: lifecycle controls as containment tools
Good lifecycle hygiene makes incidents containable: you can quickly enumerate affected identities, revoke them, and re-issue safely. Practice this with game days—simulate a leaked token and measure time-to-containment.
Governance without bureaucracy
Lifecycle management fails when it becomes a ticketing nightmare. Use policy-as-code, automated checks in CI, and standardized identity issuance so governance is enforced automatically and exceptions are measurable.
Tie lifecycle to Zero Trust outcomes
Lifecycle is how you operationalize Zero Trust for systems: continuous verification needs continuous maintenance of trust roots, policies, and issuance pipelines. Treat identity infrastructure as a product with SLAs and clear ownership. (See Identity-Based Zero Trust for Systems.)