What is identity management for NHIs?

What makes non-human identities different than carbon-based ones?

A non-human identity is more than just internet of things (IoT). It’s an identity used by any software or hardware—essentially, an identity that is not a person.

As it relates to identity and access management, here is a topline comparison of NHIs to user accounts.

Since they are tied to applications, services, and other types of digital resources, they behave and likely have different IAM requirements:

• The root of trust is no longer HR and their processes, which have long proved identities before their accounts are created. Instead, new identity control and proof processes need to be created for programmatic identities.
• Credential form factor and lifespan: contrasting from human-centric multi-factor authentication and passkeys, NHIs often use short-lived, brokered tokens.
• OAuth 2.0 client credentials are commonly used for machine-to-machine flows as well as other temporary cloud credentials/roles that use tokens, which expire quickly and can’t be reused.
• Zero trust—while least privilege remains a core principle, achieving it requires a workload rather than a user/device posture.
• Least privilege protects resources, not perimeters, which means continuously re-evaluating every request—including service-to-service. Cloud platforms now enforce conditional access for workload identities (not just users) and surface workload identity risk for automated policy decisions. This is the machine equivalent of user risk metrics that drive authentication levels.
• Achieve least privilege using lifecycle triggers—in contrast to human lifecycle management, NHI deprovisioning and offboarding is driven by pipelines and infrastructure-as-code with an explicit owner attached at creation. The rule of thumb is to not let identities outlive workloads.
• Refocus UEBA telemetry and detection from people to machine-aware identity analytics. To identify risky workloads, treat service misuse as a first-class detection problem with signals that model workload baselines for each surface. Human-centric anomaly rules spanning a day miss hidden machine abuse.

What is causing the rapid rise in NHIs across the organization?

The proliferation of non-human identities is a necessary byproduct of modern innovation. While essential for building scalable and efficient systems, this new digital workforce demands a complete rethinking of security and governance to protect against the unique risks it presents. It’s quite likely that as you even look at your own organization that you’re seeing all types of digital automation crop up. For most types of organizations, this new “digital workforce” is growing far faster than the human one. For every human employee, there can be dozens, or even over a hundred, non-human identities performing critical functions. This sheer scale presents a profound challenge to traditional identity and access management (IAM) models, which were built for a human-centric world.

It's no secret that the latest frontier in this proliferation is the rise of AI and autonomous agents. As AI systems become more capable of making their own decisions and taking actions, they need their own identities to interact with applications and data. These "AI agents" represent a new category of NHI that operates continuously and whose behavior may be more dynamic and less predictable than a traditional service account.

The proliferation of NHIs in organizations is more than a trend; it's a fundamental shift driven by the modern demand for speed and scale. This exponential growth is a direct result of automation, cloud computing, and the rise of new technologies that are creating a massive volume of new identities that need to be secured and managed.

Taking a step back, at a higher level the top drivers to NHI proliferation are to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and enable rapid innovation wherever possible. Here is one way of organizing them:

• Cloud computing and microservices: The move to the cloud, particularly with multi-cloud and microservices architectures, has exploded the number of NHIs. Each small service, container, or API now needs its own identity to communicate securely. A single user request can trigger a chain reaction involving dozens of machine-to-machine interactions, each requiring a unique identity.
• DevOps and CI/CD: Modern software development relies on automated workflows for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Non-human identities are the workers of this assembly line. Service accounts and API tokens allow build servers and deployment pipelines to access code repositories and provision infrastructure without human intervention. This automation is crucial for rapid release cycles, but it also creates a massive attack surface.
• Internet of Things (IoT): The growth of connected devices adds another layer of NHIs. Every sensor, smart device, and piece of industrial equipment need an identity to connect to the network and transmit data. Securing these thousands of distributed endpoints is a major challenge, as they often operate in less-controlled environments.

Why do security teams need to take a different approach to securing NHIs?

Unfortunately, for many cybersecurity organizations identity and access management (IAM) of NHIs is an afterthought, commonly implemented through ad hoc adoption and processes. Here are some reasons why IAM of NHIs can be difficult and needs to be treated as carefully as carbon-based identities.

Discovery and inventory

One piece of NHI reality is that they proliferate at a speed and scale that makes manual tracking impossible. This poses a challenge for organizations that have been supplementing their current IAM infrastructure with identity true-up processes. You can't secure what you can't see, and that's the fundamental challenge with NHIs. Most often, this means that you need to get a complete, real-time inventory of every single non-human identity in your environment for effective management. More than just a list, the discovery process needs to be automated to find an API key, service account, and token, whether it's in the cloud, on-premises, or in a DevOps pipeline. Beyond just finding them, you must contextualize each identity, understanding its purpose, who owns it, and what resources it can access. This provides a crucial baseline, transforming a chaotic landscape into a structured, manageable system.

Lifecycle management

Unlike human identities with clear hiring and termination dates, NHIs have a dynamic lifecycle that demands automation. Effective management requires a "start-to-finish" approach. This means securely provisioning NHIs with the right permissions from the very beginning, often directly within development workflows. This requirement often poses a major challenge to organizations who focus their management on identities residing in Microsoft Active Directory, letting the other identity stores in their organization experience identity integrity drift. As such, there are two key issues. NHIs often have their own identity stores, meaning that organizations that have focused their enterprise identity management automation on Active Directory will have to incorporate some type of additional automation. It also means that any solution that they adopt doesn’t offer continuous identity management; it introduces access vulnerabilities.

It also means establishing a strict rotation schedule, automatically updating credentials to minimize the risk of a compromised secret being used for an extended period. Just as important is the automated decommissioning of identities when they are no longer needed. This prevents orphaned or forgotten credentials from becoming persistent backdoors for attackers.

Access control and governance

Access control for NHIs is about enforcing rules at machine speed. We know how important zero trust security principles and effective least privilege practices are, to grant an identity only the permissions it needs to perform a specific task, and nothing more. While this principle is a powerful defense against all types of breaches, it’s especially valuable to NHIs because of their programmatic nature. Another critical component of governance is the ability to centralize policy enforcement, ensuring consistent access rules are in place and enforced across all your systems, whether they are in different clouds or on-premises.

To combat the common problem of hard-coded secrets, it also means that you have a dedicated secrets management platform that can be used by your developers to securely store and inject credentials at runtime. That will need to be in place before you can adopt a policy for developers to keep credential secrets out of source code.

Just-in-Time (JIT) access, an advanced access governance concept, can provide temporary, high-privilege permissions that are automatically revoked once the job is done, dramatically reducing the window of opportunity for attackers. Considering the dynamic nature that NHIs commonly have, organizations will likely find added value incorporating JIT access for NHIs that they may not have deemed necessary for traditional users.

Continuous monitoring and threat detection

NHIs work 24/7, and so should your security. Continuous monitoring is essential to detect anomalies and respond to threats in real time. This involves establishing a baseline of normal behavior for each identity and using behavioral analytics to spot deviations. For example, if an identity that normally accesses a specific database suddenly tries to connect to an HR application, it should trigger an immediate alert. Maintaining detailed audit trails of all NHI activity is also critical for compliance and forensic analysis. This level of oversight turns your vast network of machine identities from a security risk into a well-managed and transparent component of your digital operations.

With the expansion of NHIs, how do I keep my compliance and audit commitments?

NHIs introduce new challenges to compliance and audit readiness because they operate outside the traditional frameworks built for human users. Regulatory standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX require organizations to demonstrate control over who has access to sensitive data, when, and why. NHIs—such as service accounts, API tokens, and automation agents—often lack clear ownership, lifecycle visibility, and consistent governance, making it difficult to meet these requirements.

One major issue is discoverability. NHIs can be created dynamically by development pipelines or cloud services, and without automated inventory tools, many go unnoticed. This lack of visibility undermines audit efforts, as organizations cannot secure or report on identities they don’t know exist. Additionally, NHIs often use static credentials or hard-coded secrets, which are difficult to rotate and monitor, increasing the risk of non-compliance.

Audit trails must also evolve. NHIs perform critical tasks, sometimes with elevated privileges, and their actions must be logged with the same rigor as human users. This includes tracking access patterns, credential usage, and changes to permissions. Without this, organizations risk failing audits or overlooking breaches.

To stay compliant, organizations must extend identity governance to NHIs—automating discovery, enforcing least privilege, rotating credentials, and maintaining detailed logs. Treating NHIs as first-class citizens in IAM programs is essential to meeting modern compliance and audit commitments.

What are best practices for onboarding and offboarding NHIs?

Effective onboarding and offboarding of non-human identities (NHIs) are essential to maintaining security and operational integrity in modern environments. Unlike human users, NHIs—such as service accounts, API tokens, and automation agents—are often created and destroyed programmatically, making manual processes insufficient and risky. Best practices begin with automated provisioning. NHIs should be created through secure development workflows, tagged with metadata that identifies their purpose, owner, and associated workload. This ensures accountability and enables policy enforcement from the moment of creation.

Access should be granted using least privilege principles, with short-lived credentials and scoped permissions tailored to the task. Static credentials and hard-coded secrets must be avoided in favor of dynamic secrets injected at runtime via secure vaults. This reduces exposure and supports compliance requirements.

Offboarding is equally critical. NHIs must be decommissioned as soon as their associated workloads are retired. This process should be automated and triggered by infrastructure-as-code or CI/CD pipeline events. Orphaned identities—those left behind after a workload is removed—pose serious security risks and are often exploited in breaches.

Credential rotation and expiration policies should be enforced throughout the lifecycle. Regular audits of NHI inventories help identify unused or overprivileged identities. By embedding these practices into your identity governance strategy, you can ensure NHIs are securely managed from creation to retirement, reducing risk and supporting compliance in dynamic, cloud-native environments.

How can JIT access governance help meet security compliance obligations?

JIT access governance plays a vital role in helping organizations meet their security compliance obligations, especially as non-human identities (NHIs) become more prevalent. Traditional access models often grant persistent permissions, which can lead to overprivileged accounts and increased risk. JIT access flips this model by granting temporary, task-specific permissions only when needed, and automatically revoking them afterward—dramatically reducing the attack surface.

For compliance, this means tighter control over who—or what—has access to sensitive systems and data. JIT access ensures that NHIs, such as service accounts and automation agents, operate within clearly defined boundaries. It supports least privilege by default, aligning with regulatory requirements that mandate minimal access and strong access controls.

JIT also enhances auditability. Every access request is time-bound and purpose-driven, making it easier to track, justify, and report during audits. This level of granularity helps demonstrate compliance with standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX, which require detailed records of identity behavior and access events.

In dynamic environments like cloud and DevOps, JIT access integrates seamlessly with automated workflows, enabling secure, compliant operations without slowing down innovation. By embedding JIT into your identity governance strategy, you not only strengthen security but also build a defensible compliance posture in an increasingly complex digital landscape.