What is security lifecycle management?

This episode of Techsplainers explores security lifecycle management as the overarching framework for managing nonhuman identities, credentials, services and devices across their full lifespan. Framed as the culmination of a broader series on machine identities and credential security, it shows how security lifecycle management brings together identity management, secrets management, certificate controls and secure networking into a more unified approach. The episode explains how security lifecycle management helps centralize and automate critical security functions such as onboarding and deprovisioning identities, assigning and adjusting permissions, rotating credentials, securing privileged secrets in vaults, scanning for exposed credentials and enabling secure service-to-service communication. It also examines how these capabilities support zero trust, least privilege and stronger visibility across dynamic environments shaped by DevOps, cloud-native infrastructure and ephemeral workloads. Listeners will also learn why fragmented app ecosystems, unmanaged secrets and inconsistent access controls create growing security gaps, and how security lifecycle management can help reduce identity-based attack risk without slowing down innovation or automated delivery pipelines. Find more information at https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/security-lifecycle-management Find more episodes https://www.ibm.biz/techsplainers-podcast Narrated by Alice Gomstyn