Service Account 101: How to Start Managing Your Service Accounts

Our customers are constantly telling us service accounts present many security and logistical challenges. They are usually created ad-hoc, and you’ve got to manage hundreds or even thousands of services running across your network, accessing equal numbers of resources.

 

Services are programs that run in the background and spring into action when called on by a user, an application, or other services.  As such, these accounts typically don’t have people assigned to them, meaning there is little or no accountability.  If the person who created the service account leaves, they might take the credentials with them, posing a huge security issue.  How do you ensure proper management of these non-human accounts?  Service Account Governance—provisioning, reviewing, and decommissioning these services—needs to be a top priority.  Unfortunately, it’s virtually impossible to implement without proper tools.

 

Get the answers to these important questions:

• What is the best way to create workflows for service accounts?
• How can I delegate ownership?
• How/where should I be provisioning service accounts?
• What is the best way to enforce service account governance?
• How can I automate the review and decommissioning of these accounts?
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