Why do organisations struggle to secure non-human identities at the same level as human identities?

Organisations struggle because NHIs are numerous, often long lived, and frequently created outside standard identity processes. Service accounts, API keys, and tokens are hard to inventory, rotate, and monitor consistently. That creates weak visibility, excessive privilege, and poor ownership, which makes NHIs more likely to become persistence points or lateral movement paths in cloud and application environments.

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Security teams struggle to secure non-human identities because the control model was built around people, not machine access that is created by code, used by systems, and forgotten by owners. NHIs scale faster than human accounts, often bypass joiner-mover-leaver workflows, and can remain valid long after the business need ends. NHI Mgmt Group notes that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which makes consistent governance difficult from the start.

The practical risk is not just inventory sprawl. NHIs routinely hold broad permissions, embed directly into pipelines, and authenticate to cloud services, internal APIs, and third-party platforms. That means a single leaked key can behave like a durable backdoor, especially when monitoring is weak and ownership is unclear. The issue becomes visible in incidents like JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure, where secrets inside software delivery tooling can be turned into operational compromise. Current guidance from the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 still applies, but organisations often lack the asset, identity, and lifecycle discipline needed to apply it to NHIs. In practice, many security teams encounter NHI misuse only after an incident has already turned a forgotten credential into persistence.

How It Works in Practice

Effective NHI security starts by treating machine identities as first-class production assets, not as implementation details hidden in application code. That means inventorying service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, certificates, and workload identities, then tying each one to an owner, a purpose, and a renewal path. A useful operating model is to combine central discovery with policy-as-code and runtime enforcement, rather than relying on periodic manual reviews.

For most environments, the strongest pattern is short-lived, task-specific access. Instead of issuing long-lived static credentials, organisations should prefer just-in-time provisioning, ephemeral tokens, and workload identity where the system proves what it is at request time. Standards such as SPIFFE and SPIRE are commonly used to bind identity to workloads, while control planes can validate requests against current context instead of relying only on role membership. This is where the human-centric access model breaks down: a service account does not have a stable workday, and an API key does not self-report misuse.

• Assign each NHI to a named service owner and a documented business function.
• Use short TTLs, automatic revocation, and rotation tied to deployment or task completion.
• Prefer workload identity over embedded secrets wherever platforms support it.
• Monitor credential use for drift, impossible travel patterns, and unexpected tool chaining.

Research on the Ultimate Guide to NHIs shows why this matters: 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges and 71% are not rotated within recommended time frames. Those conditions are especially dangerous when combined with automated delivery systems, which can spread the same secret across repositories, CI/CD runners, and runtime environments. These controls tend to break down in legacy systems and multi-cloud estates because identity ownership, secret storage, and policy enforcement are fragmented across teams and toolchains.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter NHI control often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance automation speed against revocation discipline and auditability. That tradeoff is especially visible in environments with microservices, third-party integrations, and developer-owned platforms, where the number of identities changes faster than central teams can review them.

There is no universal standard for every NHI pattern yet. Best practice is evolving, but current guidance suggests distinguishing between persistent infrastructure identities, ephemeral workload identities, and external integration credentials. Persistent accounts may still be necessary for a small number of legacy systems, but they should be isolated, heavily monitored, and exempt only by exception. For cloud-native teams, the better answer is to reduce secrets wherever possible and replace them with federated or attested identity. This approach becomes more urgent when secrets are exposed through supply chain paths such as Code Formatting Tools Credential Leaks or Hard-Coded Secrets in VSCode Extensions. The hardest edge case is shared service credentials in hybrid environments, because multiple teams depend on them while no single owner feels accountable for rotation, logging, or offboarding.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• Why do organisations struggle to secure AI agents and other non human identities in day to day operations?
• How should security teams govern non-human identities at scale?
• How should security teams govern non-human identities for compliance?
• Why do non-human identities create more audit risk than human accounts?