Solving the non-human identity crisis: Securing your organization's invisible workforce
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By the numbers
Understanding the NHI risk
In today's enterprise environments, the majority of identities accessing systems and resources are no longer human — they're machines. These non-human identities (NHIs) — service accounts, applications, API keys, bots, agentic AI, scripts, and more — form the backbone of modern business operations. They enable automation, integration, and cloud operations that drive digital transformation.
Yet they remain largely unmanaged, invisible, and over-permissioned. In fact, a recent study showed 85% of organizations are not highly confident in their ability to prevent NHI attacks.
Why? Because while organizations have spent decades refining their approach to human identity management, NHIs have proliferated in the background with minimal governance. Traditional IAM tools, created primarily to support human identities, were never designed to handle the unique challenges posed by machine identities operating across hybrid environments.
The sprawling, ungoverned web of NHIs represents cybersecurity's fastest-growing blind spot — and an increasingly popular entry point for attackers. With the rise of AI (and agentic AI in particular), this problem is growing exponentially. Tools like GitHub Copilot and other AI assistants are dramatically increasing the creation of NHIs — often without any of the identity governance or lifecycle management that covers human identities.
Strategic snapshot
Non-human identities (NHIs) now outnumber human users by 80:1 in enterprise environments, creating a massive, largely invisible attack surface.
Traditional identity management tools weren’t designed for NHIs operating across hybrid ecosystems. The lack of visibility and stewardship allows NHIs to accumulate excessive permissions and use persistent credentials buried in code or configurations.
Unified identity security that provides comprehensive visibility, intelligent governance, and rapid remediation for both human and non-human identities.
How NHIs fall through the gaps
VISIBILITY GAPS
GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES
Why it matters: Business-critical impacts
Unmanaged and often overprovisioned NHIs create significant business exposure that goes beyond typical security concerns:
- Overprovisioning and credentials in code. NHIs are frequently granted far more access than required. This rampant overprovisioning is compounded by poor credential hygiene management — like credentials buried in code or configurations — creating persistent and unmonitored backdoors.
- Toxic combinations & undetected lateral movement. The interplay between human identities and NHIs can create “toxic combinations” where individual vulnerabilities escalate into critical exposures. Whether a compromised NHI gains control or a breached human identity exploits an NHI, the result allows bad, combined actors to potentially gain access to critical resources — often beyond the detection of traditional IAm solutions.
- Compliance & governance failures. NHIs often operate outside established governance frameworks. They lack clear ownership, structured lifecycle management, and regular access reviews.
- Operational disruption. As organizations become increasingly dependent on automation and AI, unmanaged NHIs introduce operational and security risks that can disrupt critical business functions. In fact, security incidents involving NHIs are particularly challenging to investigate and remediate due to limited visibility and unclear ownership.
- Innovation barriers. Security concerns around NHIs can slow digital transformation initiatives. Without a robust framework for managing machine identities, organizations must choose between business agility and security assurance — a false choice that constrains business potential.
Agentic AI amplifies — and transforms — the NHI problem
The rapid emergence of agentic AI amplifies existing NHI risks. But agentic AI also transforms the NHI challenge in a critical way: unlike traditional NHIs that operate in a deterministic manner — executing predefined actions with predictable outcomes — AI-powered identities function non-deterministically, making autonomous decisions based on learning and context that can vary with each execution.
This fundamental shift from predictable to unpredictable behavior creates an entirely new security paradigm. When a traditional service account accesses a database, security teams can model the exact actions it will take. With AI-driven NHIs, that predictability disappears, introducing novel risks that conventional security controls weren't designed to address. This is a growing reality that, if not addressed proactively and effectively now, will soon become a crisis for every enterprise.
Advancing autonomy increases economic value — and business risk
As agentic AI progresses — from simple query-based assistants to more sophisticated GenAI copilots and ultimately toward truly autonomous agents operating without a human in the loop — their economic and business value grows. But this increasing autonomy also escalates the complexity of the identity and access challenges:
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The path forward: Essential capabilities to secure NHIs
Organizations can close a critical identity security gap by bringing both non-human and human identities under a single intelligent framework. NHI access can be continuously monitored, right-sized, and enforced with least-privilege principles, enabling businesses to move faster, innovate boldly, and stay secure.
To effectively secure NHIs, organizations need:
Comprehensive discovery of NHIs across environments with fine-grained visibility down to the permission and resource level.
Lifecycle management including access review, proper onboarding, credential rotation and timely offboarding.
Rapid remediation capabilities to neutralize suspicious activity in seconds, not days or weeks.
The Oleria Approach
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Oleria's Trustfusion platform addresses these challenges through a graph-native architecture that connects to identity providers and applications across on-premises, SaaS, cloud, and hybrid environments. It unifies accounts, groups, resources, and permissions into a single access graph enriched with fine-grained usage insights.
Oleria enables organizations to:
- Discover NHIs with unparalleled visibility in minutes across the entire identity ecosystem
- Govern NHIs intelligently to find and fix over-permissioned, dormant, or ownerless identities.
- Remediate in seconds to reduce NHI risks with recommended actions.
From blind spot to strategic advantage
Securing NHIs isn't just about closing a security loophole — it's about re-architecting identity security for a future where machines act with autonomy and impact at scale. Organizations addressing this challenge now will gain security and competitive advantages in an increasingly automated world.
The rise of agentic AI and automation means NHIs will continue to grow in importance and risk. Enterprises that wait to address this will be left vulnerable, while those who act now can get ahead of the curve.
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