What is Aembit?

Aembit is a cloud-native Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform. It’s derived from ‘ambit’ (meaning boundary or scope). Aembit is specifically designed for managing access between workloads—a domain known as Workload IAM.

A workload is any application or program that utilizes computing resources to perform tasks. This definition includes CI/CD jobs, databases, third-party APIs, serverless functions, and custom applications. Workloads run in different environments like Kubernetes or virtual machines. Aembit primarily focuses on securing communication between these workloads over TCP/IP networks.

Unlike traditional User IAM that focuses on human access to applications, Aembit facilitates secure interactions between automated systems. These include applications, services, and APIs across diverse environments using different identity types (non-human, machine, service account, and others).

Aembit’s core principles

Manage Access, Not Secrets - The foundational principle of Aembit is to shift the security focus from managing static credentials to managing access based on verified workload identity and policy. Instead of relying on long-lived secrets that you must store, protect, and rotate, Aembit employs mechanisms to authenticate workloads based on their intrinsic properties and environment.

Aembit grants access based on defined Access Policies and real-time context.
Zero Trust Architecture - Aembit’s identity-centric approach aligns with the principles of Zero Trust architecture, extending concepts traditionally applied to human users into the domain of non-human workloads.

Aembit never implicitly trusts access.
Least Privilege - Aembit verifies every access request based on a Client Workload’s identity, the specific resource (Server Workload) being requested, and applicable contextual constraints defined in the Access Policy. This confirms adherence to the principle of Least Privilege.

Aembit grants only the necessary permissions required for a specific task at a specific time.

Key capabilities

Aembit’s primary capabilities, along with example use cases and why Aembit is well-suited for them:

Secretless workload authentication

Capability - Aembit authenticates workloads (like applications or scripts) based on their verifiable environment attributes (workload attestation) rather than relying on stored secrets like API keys or passwords.

Example Use Case - In a multicloud setup, an automated script running in an AWS EC2 instance needs to access a database hosted in Google Cloud.

Instead of embedding database credentials within the script or its configuration, Aembit verifies the script’s identity based on its AWS environment attributes.

Why Aembit is Suited - Aembit eliminates the risk of the database credentials being exposed if the script’s code or configuration files are compromised. It also removes the operational overhead of rotating and managing those static secrets.

Conditional Access Policies

Capability - Aembit enables Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)-like controls for workloads by defining access policies that consider not just the workload’s identity but also real-time contextual factors like security posture (results from a vulnerability scan), geographical location, or time of day.

Example Use Case - A microservice responsible for processing payments is only allowed to access the production billing API if all the following are true:

its identity is verified
a recent security scan (for example, via Snyk integration) shows no critical vulnerabilities
the request originates from the expected cloud region
the request originates during specific business hours

Why Aembit is Suited - Aembit provides a higher level of assurance than identity alone, mimicking for non-human interactions. Aembit enables fine-grained, risk-adaptive control, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized access even if a workload’s basic identity is somehow spoofed.

Identity brokering across heterogeneous environments

Capability - Aembit acts as a central intermediary, managing access requests between workloads that might reside in different environments (multiple public clouds, on-premises data centers, SaaS applications, third-party APIs).

Example Use Case - A legacy application running in an on-premises data center needs to fetch customer data from Salesforce (SaaS) and store processed results in an AWS S3 bucket (public cloud). Aembit manages the authentication and authorization for both interactions through a unified policy framework.

Why Aembit is Suited - It simplifies security management in complex, hybrid/multi-cloud setups by providing a single point of control and visibility, eliminating the need to configure and manage disparate access control mechanisms for each environment.

Centralized Access Policy management & auditing

Capability - Aembit provides a global system to define, enforce, and monitor access rules between all managed non-human identities. It also offers centralized logging and auditing of all access events.

Example Use Case - A security team needs to define a policy stating that only specific, approved data analytics services running in Kubernetes can access a sensitive data warehouse (like Snowflake ). They also need a consolidated audit trail of all access attempts to this data warehouse for compliance reporting.

Why Aembit is Suited - Centralization simplifies administration, makes sure policy enforcement is consistent across the board, and makes auditing and compliance reporting much easier compared to managing policies and logs scattered across different systems.

Automation & “No-Code Auth”

Capability - Aembit automates the process of authenticating workloads and providing them with necessary credentials just-in-time. Its interception mechanism (via Aembit Edge) aims to secure workload communication without requiring you to modify application code to handle authentication logic.

Example Use Case - A development team deploys a new microservice. Instead of writing code to handle API key retrieval and injection for accessing downstream services, they deploy Aembit Edge Components alongside their service. Aembit then:

automatically intercepts outgoing calls
handles authentication/authorization via a central Access Policy
injects credentials as needed

Why Aembit is Suited - Aembit reduces developer friction, speeds up deployment cycles, and makes sure the security implementation is consistent without placing the burden of complex authentication coding on application developers. It also improves operational efficiency by automating credential lifecycle management.