Beyond the Vault: 1Password’s Strategic Pivot to Extended Access Management
None
<p>The enterprise IT perimeter dissolved years ago, taking with it any illusion that security teams can dictate which applications employees use or which devices they work from. Today’s reality: employees install applications freely, work from anywhere, and routinely bypass VPN requirements to maintain productivity.</p><p>At the recent Security Field Day, 1Password laid out its strategic vision for addressing this transformed landscape, revealing how their unique vantage point exposed a critical security gap that traditional solutions miss entirely.</p><div class="code-block code-block-13" style="margin: 8px 0; clear: both;"> <style> .ai-rotate {position: relative;} .ai-rotate-hidden {visibility: hidden;} .ai-rotate-hidden-2 {position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%;} .ai-list-data, .ai-ip-data, .ai-filter-check, .ai-fallback, .ai-list-block, .ai-list-block-ip, .ai-list-block-filter {visibility: hidden; position: absolute; width: 50%; height: 1px; top: -1000px; z-index: -9999; margin: 0px!important;} .ai-list-data, .ai-ip-data, .ai-filter-check, .ai-fallback {min-width: 1px;} </style> <div class="ai-rotate ai-unprocessed ai-timed-rotation ai-13-1" data-info="WyIxMy0xIiwxXQ==" style="position: relative;"> <div class="ai-rotate-option" style="visibility: hidden;" data-index="1" data-name="U2hvcnQ=" data-time="MTA="> <div class="custom-ad"> <div style="margin: auto; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.techstrongevents.com/cruisecon-virtual-west-2025/home?ref=in-article-ad-2&utm_source=sb&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=in-article-ad-2" target="_blank"><img src="https://securityboulevard.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Banner-770x330-social-1.png" alt="Cruise Con 2025"></a></div> <div class="clear-custom-ad"></div> </div></div> </div> </div><h3><strong>The Problem: Control Is an Illusion</strong></h3><p>Single Sign-On providers created what 1Password calls a managed bubble—a contained environment where IT maintains visibility and control. But that bubble is shrinking relative to everything happening outside it. Shadow IT proliferates daily, accelerated by new AI tools that often handle the most sensitive company data. Personal devices connect to corporate resources. Third-party contractors need access. M&A brings new identity federations.</p><p>1Password calls this expanding problem the Access Trust Gap: the space between what IT can see and control versus what employees actually use to get work done. As a password manager, 1Password became the spillover bucket for API keys and credentials that SSO solutions couldn’t manage, giving them visibility into a problem most security vendors never see.</p><p>From there 1Password formulated its response: Extended Access Management (EAM), a strategy designed to secure every sign-in to every app from every device, giving users their “desired paths” to maintain productivity outside strict security boundaries.</p><h3><strong>Three Pillars of Extended Access Management</strong></h3><p>During their Security Field Day demonstration, 1Password detailed how their EAM strategy addresses three critical areas where traditional Identity Providers, Identity Governance platforms, and Mobile Device Management solutions typically fail.</p><h3><strong>Application Governance: Seeing What You Can’t Control</strong></h3><p>Trellica, acquired by 1Password, tackles Shadow SaaS by creating comprehensive visibility into every application employees actually use. It discovers both managed and unmanaged applications through multiple channels: integrating with existing Identity Providers, cross-referencing spend data from financial systems, and deploying a browser extension that identifies sign-ins using business email addresses or OAuth.</p><p>The real value isn’t just discovery—it’s centralized workflow automation. An offboarding workflow can automatically revoke sessions, lock devices through MDM integration, and reassign tasks across platforms like Google Workspace or Asana without requiring administrators to manually navigate each system. For onboarding, Trellica provisions users based on defined access levels.</p><p>This transforms application governance from a reactive firefighting exercise into proactive policy management.</p><h3><strong>Device Trust: Facts Over Faith</strong></h3><p>Unlike MDM solutions that rely on device enrollment status as a proxy for security, 1Password Device Trust takes a fact-based approach, based on agents collecting compliance signals, to determine whether a device is actually secure.</p><p>With nuanced policy enforcement, Device Trust uses “checks” to identify specific security issues—for example, an unencrypted SSH key on a developer’s laptop. When a user fails a check, they’re blocked from accessing critical applications that Device Trust discovers.</p><p>But here’s where 1Password diverges from traditional security tools: instead of just saying no, the system immediately presents customized remediation instructions.</p><p>The blocked developer sees exactly why the policy exists and how to fix the issue—in this case, by securely importing the SSH key into 1Password. This approach transforms security teams from what 1Password calls “the people of no” into enablers who direct users toward safe practices instead of simply blocking productivity.</p><h3><strong>AI Security: Deterministic Authorization for Autonomous Agents</strong></h3><p>Agentic AI represents a category-breaking challenge because it acts as both user and application simultaneously, scrambling traditional IT silos. 1Password applies stringent principles to AI security: deterministic (not probabilistic) authorization for credentials and complete auditability for AI actions.</p><p>For developers, a new feature called Environment File Mounting secures local environment variables by linking .env files to the 1Password vault via a FIFO file. This prevents accidental check-in of plaintext secrets to Git and requires authentication every time a script runs, creating both security and an audit trail.</p><h3><strong>Implementation and Real-World Constraints</strong></h3><p>Deploying EAM requires integration with existing enterprise infrastructure. Device Trust signals can gate access at the Okta level via SAML or feed into continuous compliance platforms like Vanta and Drata. For secrets management, 1Password serves as the centralized governance source while syncing secrets to last-mile vaults like AWS Secrets Manager. Trellica’s unified App Launcher combines federated apps and 1Password-stored credentials into a single access point.</p><p>But the solution faces practical limitations that 1Password acknowledged during their presentation. Trellica’s automated provisioning and deprovisioning depends entirely on whether applications offer API endpoints. Without APIs, IT teams must handle tasks manually. The “holy grail” of password management—fully automated rotation of compromised API keys and passwords—remains unsolved, though 1Password expressed commitment to solving it while maintaining their zero-knowledge architecture. Enterprise master key recovery, while using what they describe as a “state-of-the-art” consensus model, remains inherently complex.</p><h3><strong>Why This Matters? Moving From “No” to “Yes, And…”</strong></h3><p>The Access Trust Gap isn’t theoretical. It’s the daily reality of security teams watching sensitive data flow through unmanaged applications, accessed from uncontrolled devices, by an expanding constellation of identities. Traditional security tools addressed this by saying no—blocking access, restricting applications, locking down devices.</p><p>1Password’s EAM approach, detailed in their Security Field Day presentation, inverts this model. By providing unified visibility across applications, devices, and identities, security teams can enforce nuanced policies that account for real-world work patterns. The human-centric design—delivering real-time education and self-remediation instructions—allows organizations to embrace productivity-enhancing technologies, including AI, without sacrificing security.</p><p>For security teams struggling to manage shadow IT and enforce compliance across a heterogeneous device landscape, 1Password offers a path forward that treats users as partners rather than adversaries. The Access Trust Gap won’t close by expanding the managed bubble—it closes by building security that works with how people actually work.</p><p>That’s the strategic pivot: from protecting credentials to managing access across the entire, messy reality of modern enterprise IT. For 1Password, securing the password was just the beginning.</p><div class="spu-placeholder" style="display:none"></div><div class="addtoany_share_save_container addtoany_content addtoany_content_bottom"><div class="a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_20 addtoany_list" data-a2a-url="https://securityboulevard.com/2025/11/beyond-the-vault-1passwords-strategic-pivot-to-extended-access-management/" data-a2a-title="Beyond the Vault: 1Password’s Strategic Pivot to Extended Access Management"><a class="a2a_button_twitter" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/twitter?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fsecurityboulevard.com%2F2025%2F11%2Fbeyond-the-vault-1passwords-strategic-pivot-to-extended-access-management%2F&linkname=Beyond%20the%20Vault%3A%201Password%E2%80%99s%20Strategic%20Pivot%20to%20Extended%20Access%20Management" title="Twitter" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a><a class="a2a_button_linkedin" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/linkedin?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fsecurityboulevard.com%2F2025%2F11%2Fbeyond-the-vault-1passwords-strategic-pivot-to-extended-access-management%2F&linkname=Beyond%20the%20Vault%3A%201Password%E2%80%99s%20Strategic%20Pivot%20to%20Extended%20Access%20Management" title="LinkedIn" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a><a class="a2a_button_facebook" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fsecurityboulevard.com%2F2025%2F11%2Fbeyond-the-vault-1passwords-strategic-pivot-to-extended-access-management%2F&linkname=Beyond%20the%20Vault%3A%201Password%E2%80%99s%20Strategic%20Pivot%20to%20Extended%20Access%20Management" title="Facebook" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a><a class="a2a_button_reddit" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/reddit?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fsecurityboulevard.com%2F2025%2F11%2Fbeyond-the-vault-1passwords-strategic-pivot-to-extended-access-management%2F&linkname=Beyond%20the%20Vault%3A%201Password%E2%80%99s%20Strategic%20Pivot%20to%20Extended%20Access%20Management" title="Reddit" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a><a class="a2a_button_email" href="https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fsecurityboulevard.com%2F2025%2F11%2Fbeyond-the-vault-1passwords-strategic-pivot-to-extended-access-management%2F&linkname=Beyond%20the%20Vault%3A%201Password%E2%80%99s%20Strategic%20Pivot%20to%20Extended%20Access%20Management" title="Email" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a><a class="a2a_dd addtoany_share_save addtoany_share" href="https://www.addtoany.com/share"></a></div></div>