Start by inventorying credentials across employee and shared vaults, then identify company owned accounts by domain or application. Reclaim the highest risk items into a company managed model, remove duplicates, and scope access to only the people and teams that truly need it. After that, enforce rotation, revoke unnecessary access quickly, and keep a continuous audit trail for review.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Unmanaged credentials become a governance problem the moment they sit outside a clear owner, lifecycle, and audit path. In complex application environments, that often means shared vault entries, service accounts, API keys, OAuth grants, and legacy secrets that are still active long after the team that created them has moved on. The result is not just sprawl, but blind trust in access that cannot be easily explained, revoked, or reviewed against policy.
This is exactly why current NHI guidance treats secret inventory and lifecycle control as foundational. The NHI Lifecycle Management Guide and the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge both emphasise that discovery comes before enforcement, because you cannot govern what you cannot see. External standards point in the same direction: the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 pushes asset and access governance, while the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 highlights how over-privileged and unrotated machine credentials become an attacker’s fastest path.
In practice, many security teams encounter credential abuse only after a stale token, shared secret, or forgotten service account has already been used to expand access across production systems.
How It Works in Practice
The practical path is to treat unmanaged credentials as an inventory and ownership problem first, then a control problem. Start by collecting secrets from employee vaults, shared team vaults, CI/CD systems, cloud consoles, application configs, and code repositories. Then classify each item by owner, application, environment, privilege level, and whether it is a human, service, or workload credential. NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs is useful here because it frames governance as an end-to-end lifecycle, not a one-time cleanup.
From there, reclaim the highest-risk credentials into a company-managed model. That usually means replacing ad hoc shared secrets with centrally issued, short-lived credentials; removing duplicates; and assigning each credential a named business and technical owner. For application environments, the control objective is to reduce the number of places a secret can exist and the number of people who can retrieve it. Where possible, align to workload identity and automated issuance rather than static secrets. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Static vs Dynamic Secrets explains why dynamic secrets are better suited to modern application estates than long-lived embedded credentials.
- Identify every credential source, including vaults, build pipelines, apps, and cloud-native metadata stores.
- Map each secret to a real owner and application, then flag orphaned or duplicate entries.
- Replace broad shared access with least-privilege access scoped by team, environment, and function.
- Set rotation and expiry rules based on risk, not convenience, and automate revocation after use where feasible.
- Log issuance, retrieval, rotation, and revocation events so audit teams can reconstruct access history.
For regulated or high-change environments, use policy-as-code and review workflows to keep exceptions visible. The operational goal is not merely to hide secrets in a better vault, but to make each secret traceable, revocable, and accountable across its entire life. These controls tend to break down in sprawling hybrid estates with overlapping cloud accounts and inherited application ownership because attribution and rotation depend on accurate dependency mapping.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter secret governance often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance faster application delivery against stronger ownership and rotation discipline. That tradeoff becomes more visible in legacy systems, vendor integrations, and shared platform accounts where rotating one secret can disrupt multiple services at once.
Best practice is evolving for these edge cases. In some environments, the right answer is not immediate replacement, but staged reclamation: first document the account, then restrict retrieval, then move to managed issuance. In others, such as embedded credentials in third-party software or appliances, there is no universal standard for a clean migration path, so compensating controls matter more than perfection. The key is to avoid accepting “shared because it is easier” as a governance model.
NHIMG research shows why this urgency matters. In The State of Non-Human Identity Security, lack of credential rotation was cited as the top cause of NHI-related attacks by 45% of organisations, with inadequate monitoring and logging and over-privileged accounts close behind. For teams dealing with exposed application secrets, the Top 10 NHI Issues is a practical reminder that governance failures usually cluster rather than appear in isolation.
The hardest cases are systems that cannot tolerate frequent rotation, or environments where ownership is split across several teams and vendors because governance then depends on coordination, not tooling alone.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0, NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5, NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-03 | Directly addresses secret rotation and unmanaged credential risk. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-01 | Supports identity and access governance for machine and application accounts. |
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 | Covers authenticator management, including rotation and protection of secrets. |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | AC-3 | Zero trust requires explicit, least-privilege access decisions for every credential use. |
| NIST AI RMF | Governance of autonomous and automated workloads depends on lifecycle accountability. |
Establish ownership, monitoring, and risk review for every unmanaged credential and workload identity.
