Visibility
Ownership
Identity Architect
IAM Engineer
Find every unowned NHI and close the gap before your auditor finds it first
Quick Summary: Unowned non-human identities are the finding that surprises security teams at audit time — credentials that exist, have access, but have no accountable owner. Oleria, an AI-native identity security & governance platform, identifies every unowned NHI across your environment and routes ownership assignment before your next review cycle.
Every CISO dreads the question: "If something happened to this service account, who do we call?" In most enterprises the honest answer is "we don't know" - and that answer gets more dangerous every day. Oleria turns it into a live number you can watch move toward zero.
Most NHIs are created by developers in moments of urgency. The owner isn't a field on the create-form, it's tribal knowledge. Three months later, the developer has switched teams. A year later, the developer has left the company. The NHI runs on. Nobody can explain its purpose. Nobody dares revoke it without potentially breaking production. So it stays. Multiply this by every team, every quarter, for a few years, and you have what enterprises actually have today: most NHIs without a named owner.
Industry research consistently puts unowned NHI rates above 70% in enterprises that haven't put work into ownership. IDSA's Trends in Securing Digital Identities research found that 84% of organizations suffered an identity-related breach in the past year - most tied to credential sprawl and accounts with no active owner. CISA's identity security guidance flags orphaned service accounts - credentials that continue to authenticate after the creating team has reorganized or left - as one of the most persistent and underaddressed enterprise attack surfaces.
The reason this stays unsolved is not lack of awareness. It's lack of visibility. Nobody knows exactly how many unowned NHIs they have, where they live, or which ones are actively calling production systems right now. A quarterly audit snapshot isn't visibility - it's a history book. You can't fix a number you can't see live.
Oleria's Unowned NHI Identification and Remediation capability surfaces every identity without a named owner across all connected apps — continuously, not quarterly.
Filter by app, scope, last-used, risk. The thing your IdP, your CSPM, and your IGA all show fragments of, unified in one list that updates continuously.
Continuous detection means the problem doesn't accumulate invisibly between review cycles.
You have 4,231 NHIs across your connected apps. 2,894 have no named owner - 68%, par for the course. For the first time, that's a number you can actually see: broken down by app, by last-used date, by the team that created them.
You know which apps carry the most exposure. You know which unowned NHIs are actively calling production APIs versus sitting dormant. You know which ones were created by people who have since left the company.
Before Oleria, this picture didn't exist. Fragments of it lived in your IdP, your CSPM, and a handful of spreadsheets from the last audit. Now it's a single, live, queryable view - and it updates continuously.
Yes. Once you have visibility into what's unowned, Oleria surfaces AI-suggested owner candidates based on creator metadata, recent operator activity, and team structure. For each unowned NHI, reviewers confirm or correct the suggestion rather than starting from a blank field. The combination of live visibility and suggested owners is what drives unowned rates from 70%+ to under 10%.
Those surface automatically. Creator departure triggers an "owner is no longer active" flag, putting them in a high-priority unowned queue. You know about them as they happen, not when an auditor goes looking.
Owners are who NHI Reviews go to. Without owners, you can't run reviews. Most enterprises that want to run quarterly NHI Reviews find they need to solve the ownership gap first - you can't govern what you haven't named.
Oleria provides automated outreach workflows - the system notifies the suggested owner, prompts attestation, and escalates if there's no response within a defined window. Nothing stays unresolved: every unowned NHI either gets a confirmed owner or gets flagged for security team decision. The process runs continuously, not just at quarterly review time.
Ownership is the prerequisite for access reviews. Access reviews send certification requests to named owners - if there's no owner, there's no one to certify. Most IGA programs that stall on NHI reviews are blocked on this exact problem: you can't run reviews on NHIs that don't have owners on record. Solve ownership first, and access reviews become operationally viable.
