Securing Non-Human Identities

The fundamentally different nature of NHIs requires fundamentally different security approaches — including specialized tools, processes, and governance frameworks designed specifically for machine identities.

Visibility Gaps

• Limited inventory capability: Most organizations cannot answer fundamental questions about which NHIs exist or who owns them, hindering security posture and NHI governance.

• Unique complexities: NHIs span diverse technical implementations (machine accounts, API keys, AI models) each with distinct behaviors.

• Rapid proliferation: NHIs vastly outnumber human identities, creating significant blind spots.

• Complex lateral attack paths: Compromised human or NHIs enable lateral movements that are difficult to trace with traditional tools.

Governance Challenges

• Lack of stewardship: NHIs often lack clear human ownership, making accountability and corrective action difficult.

• Delegation without audit: NHIs perform tasks for humans without transparent audit trails.

• Highly privileged by design: Many NHIs inherently operated with broad, privileged access to multiple resources.

• Persistent credentials: NHIs often rely on hard-coded or long-lived credentials, creating hidden risks that are hard to detect, rotate, or manage.

No, traditional IAM tools struggle with NHI security because they were never built to manage and protect NHIs. In fact, research shows 56% of organizations find their current identity management tools insufficient for NHIs. Traditional tools struggle because of fundamental limitations:

• Designed for humans: Built around human user patterns and lifecycle management

• Limited in discovery: Can't comprehensively inventory NHIs across hybrid environments

• Coarse-grained: Lack fine-grained permission management for diverse NHI types

• Static governance: Don't account for dynamic, automated NHI operations

• Lack of rapid remediation: Require complicated, time-consuming manual actions to address over-permissioning.

Organizations need purpose-built solutions or significant tool modernization to address NHI security properly.

Addressing the security gaps around NHIs is critical for Zero Trust success:

• Never trust, always verify applies to machine identities operating 24/7

• Continuous authentication must work for automated systems

• Least privilege requires fine-grained controls for diverse NHI types

• Monitor NHI behavior for compromise indicators

Traditional Zero Trust frameworks focused on human users must be extended to handle machine identities across cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments.

NHIs create significant compliance gaps in most organizations:

• Audit trails: Difficulty proving who authorized NHI actions

• Access reviews: Traditional review processes don't work for machine identities

• Data governance: Unclear data access and usage by automated systems

• Regulatory requirements: Emerging regulations may require specific NHI controls

• Documentation: Lack of clear ownership and purpose documentation

Proactive NHI governance helps address these compliance risks before they become violations.

As agentic AI evolves from simple query-based tools to autonomous agents, the business value increases—but so does the complexity of managing AI identities and access:

• Query agents (read access): Offer read-only capabilities but carry risks of over-privileged and unattended access.

• Task & workflow agents (write access): Can modify or delete data, introducing new challenges for access delegation and auditing.

• Autonomous agents (approval access): Operate without human oversight, demanding automated approval mechanisms to ensure alignment with policies and regulations at machine speed

Start working on the governance foundations now in order to build autonomous identity management that can keep pace with autonomous AI systems:

• Assess existing NHI health: Evaluate NHI health and remediate risks from over-privileged, dormant, or orphaned NHI accounts before leveraging AI agents

• Establish delegation frameworks: Clear chains of responsibility for AI acting on behalf of humans

• Implement automated approval: Systems that can make trusted decisions without human intervention

• Modernize authentication: Move away from static secrets toward dynamic, short-lived credentials

• Enable continuous monitoring: Real-time visibility into AI agent behavior and decisions

• Govern intelligently: enforce least-privileged access at all time

NHI security will become increasingly critical as automation and AI proliferate. Trends include:

• Explosive growth: NHIs will continue vastly outnumbering human identities

• AI integration: Agentic AI will require new identity governance approaches

• Regulatory evolution: Specific NHI security requirements will emerge

• Tool specialization: Purpose-built NHI security solutions will become standard

• Autonomous governance: Self-managing identity systems that adapt to changing conditions

Organizations that address NHI security proactively will have significant competitive advantages in an increasingly automated world.