The identity security glossary

A neutral definition of an access certification campaign: the recurring review that confirms existing access is still needed, and revokes what isn’t.

A neutral definition of agentic identity: the credential and access footprint an autonomous AI agent holds and acts through, distinct from the static service account it may run under.

A neutral definition of an API key: the static token that authenticates programmatic access, and why "static" is exactly what makes it hard to govern.

A neutral definition of Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management: what it right-sizes within a cloud platform, and where its boundary is.

A neutral definition of Identity Attack Surface Management: mapping every path an attacker could take through identity and privilege, not just scoring the accounts you already know about.

A neutral definition of Identity Governance and Administration: the lifecycle and certification workflows it runs, and the data those workflows depend on.

A neutral definition of an identity graph: the correlated map of identities, accounts, and relationships that turns scattered records into a single, queryable structure.

A neutral definition of identity lifecycle management: the joiner-mover-leaver process that provisions, adjusts, and revokes access as a role changes.

A neutral definition of an Identity Operations Center: the team and workflow that turns continuous identity data into daily triage, investigation, and remediation.

A neutral definition of an identity risk score: the composite metric that ranks accounts by exposure, and the inventory it depends on to be accurate.

A neutral definition of Identity Security Posture Management: what it scores, and the inventory that score depends on.

A neutral definition of Identity Threat Detection and Response: how it detects identity-based attacks, and what it needs to detect against.

A neutral definition of a local account: the machine-level login that most identity and PAM tooling structurally can’t see.

A neutral definition of M&A identity risk: what happens to identity governance when two account inventories, two IdPs, and two sets of assumptions suddenly merge into one.

A neutral definition of Non-Human Identity: the service accounts, API keys, workload identities, and AI agents that now outnumber humans, and why they get governed differently.

Machine identities passed human identities years ago and the gap keeps widening. A few figures that explain why non-human identity has become the leading edge of the IVIP category, sourced from Hydden's own operating data.

A neutral comparison of passive and active identity discovery: how each approach finds accounts, and why environments with sensitive or legacy infrastructure often require both.

A neutral definition of Privileged Access Management: what it vaults, rotates, and brokers, and where its coverage stops.

A neutral definition of segregation of duties: the control that prevents any single identity from holding two conflicting permissions, like requesting and approving the same payment.

A neutral definition of a service account: the credential that lets one system authenticate to another, and why it tends to accumulate risk faster than a human account.

A neutral definition of a shadow admin account: privileged access that exists outside the accounts a security team already knows to protect.

A neutral definition of workload identity: the identity assigned to a running process rather than a person, and why it multiplies faster than any inventory built for human accounts.

A neutral definition of Zero Standing Privilege and just-in-time access: granting elevated permissions only for the moment they’re needed, then revoking them automatically.