Why Full Non-Human Identity Coverage Requires Connecting to Systems Everyone Else Can’t See

There’s a foundational difference between human and Non-Human Identity (NHI) infrastructure, and it's critical to securing the systems that actually run your business.

First, human identity management centralized and then moved to the cloud. IDPs like Active Directory, Okta, and Google Workspace enabled centralized employee access and made single sign-on the standard. It was a straightforward shift because human access follows predictable patterns: users log in, use a few approved apps, and leave an audit trail.

Nonhuman identity never had that luxury.

Instead of centralizing, NHI has gone the opposite way by fragmenting across services, environments, protocols, and networks. Every database, workload, CI/CD pipeline, API client, and server has its own authentication mechanism, secrets model, and identity silo. And nowhere is this more visible than in the infrastructure no one wants to touch: self-hosted databases, on-prem servers, and air-gapped networks.

The Blind Spot No One Talks About

Most modern security tools were built with SaaS-first assumptions where everything is internet-accessible, API-driven, and easy to integrate with agentless methods. That works for part of the problem.

But what about the Postgres server in your private subnet? Or the Active Directory instance running in your telecom’s local data center? Or the Snowflake environment that's deliberately disconnected from the public internet to comply with healthcare data regulations?

These aren’t edge cases. They’re common. They’re critical. And they’re almost entirely invisible to agentless security platforms.

This is a problem Token Security has solved.

Reaching the Unreachable

To provide full enterprise coverage of NHIs including the ones no one else can see, we built a lightweight, container-based reverse proxy that allows secure, encrypted access to internal environments.

Here’s how it works:

• A Token Security proxy agent is deployed inside your private network. It’s just a container that can run on Docker, Kubernetes, or any other standard environment.
• The proxy establishes an outbound connection to the Token Security platform using a tunneling protocol with mutual TLS encryption. It’s based on the Fast Reverse Proxy open-source project.
• Once connected, Token Security can securely query internal services as if it had local access without introducing new attack surface or requiring intrusive network changes.

This isn’t theoretical. Customers are using it in production:

• A federal healthcare organization needed visibility into service accounts accessing Snowflake, but its Snowflake instance is disconnected from the internet because it hosts patient data. Our proxy made secure visibility possible without changing their network posture and violating compliance boundaries.
• A global telecom provider with an extensive on-prem Active Directory environment uses Token Security to monitor service accounts and identity configurations across a sprawling, disconnected infrastructure.
• Nearly every software company still runs some self-hosted databases like Postgres, either on-prem or in cloud VMs. These systems often rely on local, unmanaged credentials that fall outside of standard identity tooling. Token Security’s proxy makes those visible and governable.

Why This Matters for NHI Security

These isolated systems aren’t edge cases. They’re often where the most critical data and workloads live. And, they're precisely the systems most vendors can’t reach.

We're not trying to be an asset discovery tool or scan every subnet. If a customer wants Token Security to monitor an internal service, we give them a secure, low-friction way to connect it, even if it’s technically offline.

This capability gives Token a NHI discovery and visibility advantage that’s hard to overstate:

• We secure NHI across cloud and self-hosted environments
• We monitor systems that are invisible to agentless solutions
• We do it without requiring architectural concessions or internet exposure

If you're building infrastructure with real-world complexity, hybrid networks, legacy systems, compliance boundaries, you need NHI visibility that goes beyond cloud services and SaaS applications.

To learn more, request a demo of the Token Security Platform today.

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