SandboxAQ launches AQtive Guard Protect for machine credentials

SandboxAQ has announced the general availability of its new product, AQtive Guard Protect, which is designed to enhance security for non-human identities and cryptographic assets within enterprise IT environments.

The company reports that the growth of artificial intelligence adoption across enterprises is contributing to a spike in machine-to-machine systems operating without comprehensive identity or policy controls. Non-human identities, which refer to accounts and credentials used by machines, applications, and automated services, are becoming increasingly prevalent and now represent the majority of access credentials within many organisations.

According to SandboxAQ, this rise in non-human credentials has created new management and security challenges for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and their infrastructure teams. The complexity is compounded by the limitations of current tools, which often fail to provide adequate visibility or automation for effectively securing machine identities.

The company states that AQtive Guard Protect is built on their existing AQtive Guard Discover technology, which inventories non-human identities and cryptographic assets throughout an organisation. The new product aims to provide deep observability, workflow automation, and enhanced governance for machine credentials that are at higher risk of exposure or misuse.

"As AI adoption accelerates, the number of machine identities inside organizations has grown exponentially while the tooling to manage them hasn't kept pace with it," said Marc Manzano, General Manager of the Cybersecurity Group at SandboxAQ. "AQtive Guard Protect gives security teams a focused way to manage and secure credentials at scale, before they turn into a security risk."

Credential-based threats are viewed by the company as an escalating issue. SandboxAQ points to its recent 2025 AI Security Benchmark Report, which found that fewer than 30 percent of enterprises have conducted an AI-specific security assessment. The report also found that only 6 percent have implemented protections specifically designed for AI infrastructure.

The company describes AQtive Guard Protect as a response to these findings, offering several core features aimed at reducing risk:

• Continuous observability and threat detection that monitors credential activity and flags unusual patterns before they become security incidents.
• Automated management features that handle the rotation, revocation, and update of secrets at scale to minimise manual errors and operational risks.
• Last-mile defence mechanisms designed to protect credentials within specific areas such as workloads, containers, and pipelines.

SandboxAQ highlights that AQtive Guard Protect integrates with existing security tools and workflows, allowing organisations to introduce greater oversight of non-human identities and cryptographic policies without creating additional operational challenges.

In recognition of changing IT infrastructure trends, the product offers support for multi-cloud, hybrid, and containerised environments, which are common across modern enterprises. The product is now accessible via the AWS Marketplace, providing a route for security teams to deploy, scale, and manage purchases through established cloud vendor agreements.

The company developed AQtive Guard Protect in response to feedback from CISOs and infrastructure operational teams, seeking to lower the manual workload required to manage increasing volumes of machine credentials while improving the foundational cybersecurity posture of their organisations.

SandboxAQ is positioning AQtive Guard Protect as a solution capable of addressing both the observability and governance gaps associated with the management of machine identities, aiming to help security teams move towards a more automated and risk-aware approach.