Tools that manage the lifecycle, access certification, and policy enforcement for human user identities across enterprise systems. They were built to ensure the right people have the right access and that access is reviewed, certified, and audited over time.
IGA tools solve a well-defined problem: governing which humans have access to which systems, with lifecycle management, periodic certification campaigns, and audit trails that satisfy compliance requirements. They work well for human identity processes — joiner-mover-leaver flows tied to HR events, role-based access reviews, and segregation of duties policies.
The gap appears when the identity in question is not a person: IGA tools were designed around the cadence of human employment, where identities exist for months or years. Workload identities operate at a completely different pace. A microservice or AI agent may exist for seconds, spin up thousands of times a day, and never appear in an HR system at all. Aembit fills that gap with runtime access management for non-human identities: policy-based, secretless, and attestation-driven. Critically, IGA is excellent at finding privilege problems through visibility and audit. Aembit proactively fixes them by enforcing access policy at the moment of execution, before unauthorized access can occur.
Aembit does not replace IGA. IGA governs human identity lifecycle and access certification, a problem Aembit was not designed to solve.
IGA handles human identity lifecycle: provisioning and deprovisioning accounts based on HR events like hiring, role changes, and departures; running access certification campaigns; and enforcing segregation of duties policies for employees and contractors. Aembit handles the other side of the same environment: applications, services, AI agents, and CI/CD pipelines that need to authenticate to other systems without human intervention, and that exist on a deployment cadence rather than an HR cadence. There is also a specific risk that IGA cannot address: orphaned workload identities. When a developer creates a service account or API key and later leaves the organization, IGA will manage the human’s account but the machine credential typically persists indefinitely, with no owner and no review cycle. Aembit eliminates this risk structurally. Because Aembit-managed workloads use short-lived, attestation-bound credentials rather than persistent service accounts, there is nothing to orphan.
Organizations running SailPoint, Saviyant, or OneIdentity can use Aembit to extend the same governance principles to non-human identities without replacing their existing IGA investment. Aembit’s attestation-based access logs for services and AI agents can feed the same SIEM and compliance workflows that IGA certification data already flows into, simplifying SOC 2, NIST, and PCI evidence collection across both human and non-human identity types. This creates a unified audit picture: IGA provides the human access review record, Aembit provides the runtime non-human access record, and both flow into the same evidence repository.
PAM handles human privileged sessions: an admin checking into a production server, a developer accessing a cloud console, a vendor connecting to a sensitive system. Ambit handles the other side: applications, services, Al agents, and CI/CD pipelines that need to authenticate to those same sensitive systems without human intervention. PAM is optimized for the relatively small number of human administrators in an environment – session-based, interactive, with approval workflows and session recording. A microservice or Al agent operating at scale makes thousands of authentication requests per hour, has no interactive session, and cannot wait for a human approval workflow.
Get started in minutes, with no sales calls required. Our free- forever tier is just a click away.
