The Wake-Up Call You Didn't Know You Needed
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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.
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.
Unmanaged and often overprovisioned NHIs create significant business exposure that goes beyond typical security concerns:
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.
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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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.
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.
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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:
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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