They should manage human and non-human access as one governance surface. Employee authentication, service accounts, vendor credentials, and application secrets all need ownership, review, and revocation discipline, otherwise attackers will shift to whichever identity type is least visible.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
IAM and NHI teams are often organised around different tooling, but the risk surface is the same: identities that can authenticate, request access, and move data or secrets. Human sign-in controls and non-human workload controls fail when they are reviewed separately, because attackers usually do not care which identity type they abuse first. Current guidance from the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 treats identity governance as a cross-cutting function, not a siloed one.
That matters because NHI programs tend to accumulate hidden access faster than human IAM programs, especially across service accounts, API keys, and third-party automations. NHIMG research shows the maturity gap clearly: The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report found that 88.5% of organisations say non-human IAM lags behind or only matches human IAM. In practice, the gap becomes visible only after privileged secrets are overexposed, reused, or left without a clear owner. Security teams that do not align both disciplines end up with duplicate reviews, inconsistent revocation, and blind spots in incident response. In practice, many security teams encounter this only after a credential misuse event has already crossed from one identity domain into the other, rather than through intentional governance design.
How It Works in Practice
The cleanest operating model is shared governance with clear domain ownership. IAM usually owns the identity lifecycle for people, contractors, and workforce access policy. NHI teams usually own workload identities, secrets, service accounts, certificate usage, and runtime access patterns. The overlap is where the control model must be unified: who approves access, who reviews it, who rotates it, and who revokes it when the business or application changes.
That shared surface should be built around inventory, ownership, and policy. Security teams should map every non-human identity to an application, pipeline, or workload owner, then enforce review cadence the same way they do for human access. For NHI, this often means replacing standing credentials with short-lived tokens, tying access to workload identity, and requiring just-in-time issuance for privileged tasks. For IAM, that means extending joiner-mover-leaver discipline to vendors, automation accounts, and machine-to-machine trust relationships. Standards such as NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls support this by pushing least privilege, access enforcement, and auditability across identity types.
- Use one identity inventory, not separate spreadsheets for people and machines.
- Assign a named business owner for each service account, secret, or API credential.
- Review high-risk NHI access on the same cycle as privileged human access.
- Prefer ephemeral credentials and workload identity over long-lived static secrets.
- Feed IAM events and NHI events into the same monitoring and incident process.
NHIMG guidance on Ultimate Guide to NHIs and the Top 10 NHI Issues reinforces the operational reality: identity sprawl is a governance problem before it is a tooling problem. These controls tend to break down in hybrid environments with unmanaged service ownership because revocation paths are unclear and no single team can prove effective control.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter identity governance often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance faster delivery against stronger review and revocation discipline. That tradeoff is most visible when development teams, platform teams, and third-party integrations all need access at different speeds. Current guidance suggests the answer is not separate exceptions for each team, but tiered controls based on risk and runtime context.
Some environments need special handling. In CI/CD pipelines, IAM may own developer authentication while NHI owns pipeline secrets and deployment identities. In SaaS integrations, vendor credentials may sit outside normal employee workflows, but they still need the same ownership and expiry discipline. In cloud and multi-cloud environments, consistency becomes harder, and NHIMG research in The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report shows that cross-environment consistency is one of the top challenges. This is where 52 NHI Breaches Analysis is useful as a cautionary reference: teams usually miss the weak link at the boundary between human approval and machine execution. The current consensus is that there is no universal standard for shared IAM and NHI operating models yet, but the direction is clear: one governance surface, differentiated controls, and no identity type left outside review.
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, OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 and CSA MAESTRO address the attack and risk surface, while NIST AI RMF and NIST CSF 2.0 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 exposure risks across machine identities. |
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | A01 | Agentic systems need runtime access control across autonomous tool use. |
| CSA MAESTRO | MAESTRO-5 | Aligns governance for autonomous workloads and delegated execution. |
| NIST AI RMF | AI risk governance applies when automation can change identity usage dynamically. | |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Least-privilege access management spans both human and non-human identities. |
Rotate NHI secrets on a defined cadence and replace standing credentials with short-lived issuance.
