Treat them as one governance problem with different privilege patterns, not as separate programmes. Use a shared policy model for approvals, entitlements, review cadence, and revocation, then adapt the operational controls for the actor type. Human access may need more user-experience handling, while machine access needs tighter lifecycle discipline and stronger evidence of task-bounded privilege.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Identity teams are being asked to govern humans, service accounts, API keys, and increasingly autonomous agents through the same control plane. That matters because attackers do not respect organisational lines: they move from weak human access hygiene to over-privileged machine access, or the reverse, depending on where the fastest path exists. NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, which means separate programmes often create blind spots rather than clarity.
Current guidance suggests treating both identity classes under one governance model for approvals, entitlements, reviews, and revocation, then tuning the operational mechanics by actor type. That aligns with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 emphasis on consistent governance and risk ownership across assets and identities. For machine access, the real issue is lifecycle discipline: key issuance, rotation, revocation, and evidence of task-bounded privilege. For human access, the issue is usually policy drift, standing privilege, and review fatigue. In practice, many security teams discover the mismatch only after a service account, token, or delegated admin path has already been used to move laterally.
How It Works in Practice
The most workable model is a shared identity governance baseline with distinct control patterns underneath. Start by using one approval framework for all access requests so managers, application owners, and security reviewers are judging risk with the same criteria. Then split execution into human and machine paths. Humans usually map to RBAC, joiner-mover-leaver workflows, MFA, and periodic access attestations. Machines need stricter lifecycle controls: inventory, ownership, purpose binding, short TTLs, rotation, and revocation on job completion.
This is where the NHI lifecycle view from Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs becomes practical. It reinforces that a machine identity should be treated like a managed workload credential, not a user surrogate. For machine access, best practice is evolving toward just-in-time issuance, cryptographic workload identity, and policy checks at request time rather than annual approval alone. The OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 is useful here because it frames the dominant failure modes: exposed secrets, excessive privilege, weak rotation, and poor offboarding.
- Use a single entitlement catalog so humans and machines are reviewed against the same business justification.
- Tag every machine identity with owner, system, environment, and expiry date.
- Automate revocation when a workload is decommissioned, a pipeline changes, or a credential is unused beyond policy.
- Prefer short-lived tokens and workload identity over shared static secrets wherever possible.
This guidance breaks down in highly fragmented environments where IAM, CI/CD, cloud, and endpoint teams each control different parts of the identity lifecycle because revocation and evidence collection become inconsistent.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter governance often increases operational overhead, so organisations have to balance stronger control with delivery speed and user experience. That tradeoff is especially visible when one programme covers employees, contractors, robots, scripts, and production workloads. There is no universal standard for how much of the review process should be shared versus separated, but current guidance suggests sharing the policy decision and separating the enforcement path.
One common edge case is delegated administration, where a human initiates an action that is then executed by a service account or agent. Another is break-glass access for incident response, where both human and machine credentials may need temporary elevation. In those cases, the control objective is still the same: minimum privilege, explicit time bounds, and revocation that can be proven after the fact. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Regulatory and Audit Perspectives is a strong reminder that auditors increasingly expect evidence of who approved access, what was granted, for how long, and whether it was removed on schedule.
For teams building toward maturity, the practical test is simple: if the same control cannot explain both a user login and a machine token issuance, the programme is not yet unified enough. That gap is often most visible in environments with heavy third-party integration, where ownership is unclear and access review data is incomplete.
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 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 | Covers secret rotation and lifecycle discipline for machine access. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-1 | Supports unified access governance across people and machines. |
| NIST AI RMF | AI governance helps extend identity oversight to autonomous machine actors. |
Apply one access policy model, then enforce actor-specific controls for requests, approvals, and revocation.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- How should security teams govern human and non-human access in one programme?
- How should security teams govern non-human identities that have persistent access?
- How should security teams govern human and non-human access in the same programme?
- Who should own AI identity decisions when human, machine, and agentic access overlap?
