In cybersecurity, we often rush to solutions, implementing detection tools and response platforms, without first answering a fundamental question: What identities do we actually have?
This visibility gap has become the silent killer of security programs. Organizations deploy sophisticated threat detection systems while remaining completely blind to their identity attack surface. They invest millions in security infrastructure while orphaned service accounts, over-privileged AI agents, and forgotten API keys lurk undetected across their environments.
The harsh reality: You can't protect what you don't know exists. That's why we built Permiso Discover.
Modern enterprises face an identity explosion that security teams cannot comprehend manually. For every human employee, organizations now manage an average of 50 non-human identities, including service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, machine identities, and AI agents with autonomous access to critical systems.
These identities are scattered across multiple cloud service providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), dozens of SaaS applications (Salesforce, GitHub, Slack), identity providers with federated access (Okta, Azure AD), on-premises systems with hybrid connections, CI/CD pipelines with deployment credentials, and AI platforms with model training access. The challenge isn't just scale, it's complexity. Identities form intricate webs of relationships and trust boundaries that evolve constantly.
Without comprehensive visibility, orphaned accounts become backdoors when projects end or employees leave yet their credentials remain active. Over-privilege goes undetected when organizations grant excessive access "just in case," with only 55% of AWS IAM permissions actually utilized. Compliance becomes guesswork as auditors ask "Who has access to customer data?" and teams scramble to piece together answers. Incident response starts blind as every investigation begins with hours of manual discovery before actual response can start.
Permiso Discover solves the identity visibility challenge at enterprise scale, providing comprehensive inventory and real-time tracking across all identity types (Human, Non-Human and AI) without complexity or cost unpredictability.
Permiso Discover provides complete identity discovery through 50+ native integrations covering cloud providers, SaaS applications, and identity systems. The platform inventories all identity types, from human users to service accounts to AI agents, with cross-environment tracking showing where identities exist across system boundaries. Real-time inventory updates continuously as your environment evolves, ensuring you always know what identities exist and where they're located.
Unlike point solutions that focus only on service accounts or cloud-specific tools that miss SaaS identities, Permiso Discover delivers truly comprehensive coverage of your entire identity landscape. Whether identities live in AWS, authenticate through Okta, access data in Salesforce, or operate AI models in Azure, Permiso Discover sees them all in a unified inventory.
At the heart of Permiso Discover is the Universal Identity Graph, a living map of every identity and its relationships across your entire environment. This isn't just an inventory spreadsheet. It's contextual intelligence that reveals who can access what through direct and indirect permission paths, how identities connect through trust relationships and privilege escalation routes, and where identities span multiple environments.
The Universal Identity Graph transforms raw identity data into actionable visibility. Security teams can instantly answer critical questions: Which service accounts have production database access? What identities can this account reach through federated access? Where are our AI agents deployed? Who has access to customer PII across all systems? These questions that previously required days or weeks of investigation now have immediate answers.
This relationship-centric approach reveals connections that traditional inventory tools miss, such as federated access paths spanning multiple systems, service accounts with cascading permissions across cloud environments, and third-party integrations with broader access than security teams realized. Understanding these relationships is essential for comprehensive security because identities don't exist in isolation, they form complex webs that define your actual attack surface.
Static inventory becomes outdated the moment it's generated. Permiso Discover provides continuous, real-time tracking that maintains an always-current view of your identity landscape. As developers create new service accounts, as employees join or leave, as AI systems deploy new agents, Permiso Discover automatically updates your inventory without manual scans or scheduled jobs.
This real-time capability ensures security teams always work with accurate information. When incident responders need to know "What identities exist in this compromised environment?" they get current answers, not month-old snapshots. When auditors ask "Who currently has access to this system?" compliance teams provide up-to-date documentation, not best guesses based on stale data.
The continuous nature of Permiso Discover's inventory tracking also reveals patterns of identity creation and usage. Security teams can see when identity sprawl accelerates, when new identity types appear in the environment, and when previously unknown integration points emerge. This visibility into identity lifecycle dynamics helps teams stay ahead of complexity rather than constantly playing catch-up.
Permiso Discover doesn't limit discovery to obvious identity sources. The platform provides comprehensive coverage across human identities (employees, contractors, vendors, guests with various access levels), service accounts (application identities with automated access to systems and data), API keys and tokens (programmatic access credentials used by applications and scripts), machine identities (certificates, secrets, encryption keys used for system-to-system authentication), and AI agents (model training accounts, autonomous systems, bot identities with delegated permissions).
This complete coverage ensures no identity type falls through the gaps. Traditional approaches focus on human users or cloud service accounts but miss the API keys in developer environments, the certificates in CI/CD pipelines, or the AI agent identities accessing training data. Permiso Discover sees everything, providing the comprehensive inventory that modern security programs require.
The platform also tracks identity attributes that matter for security and compliance, including assigned permissions and access levels, last authentication time and usage frequency, associated resources and data access, ownership and management responsibility, and environment classification (production, staging, development). This metadata transforms a simple list into actionable intelligence.
Visibility without action is just expensive reporting. Permiso Discover delivers immediately actionable insights from your identity inventory. Orphaned account identification rapidly finds dormant identities that should be decommissioned. Over-privileged visibility shows identities with excessive permissions that violate least-privilege principles. Compliance documentation generates audit-ready reports showing who has access to what. Environment hygiene reveals identity sprawl and duplication issues. Third-party access tracking shows which external vendors and integrations have internal access.
These insights don't require complex analysis or custom queries. Permiso Discover surfaces the most common security concerns automatically, helping teams address critical gaps quickly. Security teams can identify and remediate their highest-risk exposures within the first week of deployment, gaining immediate value while building comprehensive long-term visibility.
Permiso Discover provides the visibility foundation every security program needs. With comprehensive identity inventory, security teams can finally answer fundamental questions: What identities do we have? Where are they located? What can they access? Who manages them? Are they still needed? These basic questions that organizations struggle with for months become instantly answerable.
This inventory-first approach enables every other security capability. You can't detect anomalous identity behavior without knowing which identities exist. You can't enforce least-privilege policies without understanding current permission assignments. You can't respond to incidents effectively without rapidly identifying affected identities. You can't demonstrate compliance without comprehensive documentation of who has access to what.
Organizations that establish comprehensive identity inventory first build security programs on solid ground. Those that skip this step find themselves constantly reacting, always behind, never able to catch up with identities they didn't know existed. The difference between proactive security and perpetual firefighting often comes down to one thing: knowing what identities you're protecting.
While Permiso Discover focuses on comprehensive inventory and real-time tracking, it's designed as the foundation for complete identity security. Once you establish visibility into what identities exist and where they're located, you can expand to deeper capabilities.
Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) builds on Discover's inventory to assess identity configurations, identify misconfigurations and policy violations, and recommend security improvements. Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) adds behavioral monitoring, threat-informed detection rules, and automated response capabilities to catch and stop active attacks. Complete platform coverage unifies inventory, posture, detection, and response into a single comprehensive solution.
Permiso Discover provides the essential first step with a clear path to comprehensive identity security as your organization's needs and maturity evolve. You start with knowing what you have, then progress to ensuring it's configured securely, then to detecting when it's being misused, and finally to automated response when threats emerge.
Learn more about how Permiso Discover provides comprehensive identity inventory and real-time tracking across your environment, delivering the foundation your security program needs to understand and protect your complete identity attack surface.