They should govern them under the same programme, but not with identical controls. The shared requirement is visibility into who or what is authorised. The difference is that machine identities usually need tighter ownership, shorter lifecycle expectations, and clearer operational handoff. A single programme works best when it distinguishes subject type while keeping one governance record.
How should access governance treat people and machines differently?
A single programme should normalise how access is discovered, approved, reviewed and revoked, but it should not assume the same control design fits every subject. Human identities and machine identities differ most in ownership, authentication method, lifecycle, and acceptable review cadence. The governing model should reflect that difference without creating separate policy islands.
The practical test is whether the programme can answer the same questions for both: what is this identity, who owns it, what can it reach, and when should that access end? If the answer is consistent across people and machines, governance is strong; if machine access sits outside the review, inventory or revocation process, the programme is incomplete.
That is why identity governance and administration works best when it treats subject type as a control attribute rather than a separate operating model. A good reference point is IAM and IGA Basics, which frames authentication, authorization, entitlement review and governance together across people and machines.
Where the model should diverge for machine identities
Machines usually need tighter ownership and shorter lifecycle expectations because they do not self-report, complain, or renegotiate access. Their credentials, tokens, certificates and API keys are often embedded in workflows, so governance has to account for automation dependencies, rotation pressure and decommissioning. That makes NHI Lifecycle Management Guide and Guide to NHI Rotation Challenges especially useful when the question is how to govern machine access without breaking production.
The main distinction is not permission theory, it is operational accountability. A human user can usually be recertified through manager or app-owner review, but a machine identity often needs a named technical owner, a clear service dependency, and an explicit retirement trigger. Without that, access becomes permanent by default, even when the business process behind it has changed.
A useful way to sharpen that distinction is to compare the two identity classes directly. Human vs Non-Human Identity is helpful because it shows where shared governance ends and subject-specific lifecycle handling begins, especially around delegated access and shared credentials.
What a unified governance programme needs to answer first
A unified programme should first establish inventory, ownership and reviewability. If the organisation cannot reliably enumerate machine identities, link each one to a system or service owner, and prove that stale access is removed, the programme is only partially governing access. Top 10 NHI Issues and Access Reviews and Certification Guide both reinforce that access governance fails when reviews are too broad, too manual, or disconnected from the system that actually grants access.
The governance record should therefore carry subject type, owning team, purpose, authentication method, expiry expectations and last-review evidence. That record is the bridge between one programme and different controls. It lets the organisation keep a single decision trail while still applying stronger expectations to machine identities where the blast radius is often larger and the review cadence must be more aggressive.
For teams designing the operating model, IAM and IGA Basics also helps because it ties governance to entitlement management, joiner-mover-leaver processes and role design rather than to a single account type.
Risk and Threat Considerations
Unified governance fails when machine identities are treated like low-friction technical accounts rather than governed access subjects. The result is usually long-lived credentials, weak ownership, overprivilege and delayed revocation, which gives attackers a durable access path if a secret is exposed or a service is repurposed without control updates.
Failure mechanism: The organisation records the identity once, but does not keep the owner, purpose, expiration and revocation path current as systems change. That creates orphaned or over-scoped access, especially where automation uses shared keys or certificates.
Impact: Exposure can spread quietly through production systems, and a compromise of one machine identity can create lateral movement, data access, or service impersonation that is harder to spot than a human account misuse.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and CIS Controls v8 set the technical controls, while ISO/IEC 27001:2022 defines the regulatory obligations.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | Machine and human access both depend on lifecycle control of credentials and authenticators. |
| IA-9 — Service Identification and Authentication | Machine identities usually authenticate as services, workloads, or APIs. | |
| AC-2 — Account Management | A unified governance model needs inventory, ownership, and revocation across account types. | |
| Recommendation — Apply IA-5 to govern issuance, rotation, storage, and revocation of authenticators. Use IA-9 to distinguish service authentication from human login controls. Use AC-2 to keep account ownership, status, and removal processes current. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-5 — Account Management | The question is about governance over who or what should retain access. |
| Recommendation — Maintain a complete account inventory and disable stale access promptly. | ||
| ISO/IEC 27001:2022 | A.5.15 — Access control | The page is about how access should be governed under one programme. |
| Recommendation — Define access control rules that apply consistently across identity types. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to prioritise: Keep one governance workflow, but make subject type mandatory in the record so review rules, expiration targets and ownership differ between people and machines. If the record cannot tell you who owns the machine identity and when it should be retired, the control is not ready for audit or incident response.
What to verify: Confirm that machine identities are linked to a service owner, a rotation or expiry expectation, and a decommissioning path. Also verify that exceptions are explicit, time-bound and reviewed, not left as permanent operational waivers.
Practitioner takeaway: The best model is shared governance with differentiated control depth, because consistency in the programme matters more than identical treatment of every identity type.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- Should organisations manage human, machine, and AI identities in separate access queues?
- Should organisations treat NHI secrets and human credentials under the same governance model?
- Should organisations include contractors, bots, and non-human identities in the same governance model?
- How should security teams run access reviews for non-human identities?