Machine identity governance is lagging behind operational reality

At a glance

What this is: This is an analysis of why machine identities have outgrown people-centric identity models and what that means for governance.

Why it matters: IAM, PAM, and IGA teams need to treat machine identities as first-class governed identities because persistent access and weak visibility expand blast radius across cloud and hybrid estates.

By the numbers:

• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.

👉 Read Commvault's discussion of machine identity governance and privilege sprawl

Context

Machine identity governance is the discipline of understanding, approving, monitoring, and retiring the identities used by applications, services, APIs, and automated workloads. The article’s core point is that the old user-centric identity model breaks down once non-human identities operate continuously, create access dynamically, and persist across systems without the same lifecycle discipline applied to people.

That matters because identity programmes still tend to organise control around human review cycles, but machine identities do not wait for those cycles. They are often created in deployment flows, granted access to keep systems functioning, and then left in place long after their original purpose has changed. In practice, that produces hidden privilege and weak accountability across the environment.

The governance question is no longer whether machine identities exist. It is whether security teams can answer where they are created, what they can reach, who owns them, and how they are retired when no longer needed. Without that baseline, visibility and control remain disconnected.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when machine identities are not governed like other identities?

A: Visibility, ownership, and retirement all fail at the same time. Machine identities are often created outside the human identity lifecycle, so access persists after the original business need has changed. That leaves organisations with sanctioned credentials that nobody can clearly explain, review, or remove.

Q: Why do machine identities increase lateral movement risk?

A: Because they often carry persistent access and can be embedded in trusted workflows, which makes them attractive pivot points after an initial compromise. Once an attacker reaches one overprivileged account, the machine identity can provide broader reach than a normal user account would.

Q: How do security teams know if machine identity governance is working?

A: They should be able to answer basic questions quickly: how many machine identities exist, who owns each one, what systems each one can reach, and whether its access is still required. If those answers are slow or incomplete, governance is still immature.

Q: Who should be accountable for machine identities?

A: A human owner or clearly defined system owner should be accountable for each machine identity, because accountability cannot be inferred from the application alone. Without that mapping, access reviews, incident response, and offboarding become guesswork instead of governance.

Technical breakdown

Why machine identities break the human access model

Human identity governance assumes an identifiable person, a stable onboarding and offboarding event, and periodic review of access. Machine identities do not follow that pattern. They are often created programmatically, embedded in applications or pipelines, and allowed to persist because they are operationally convenient. That means the entitlement set can grow faster than teams can review it, and ownership can drift away from the original deployment context. The technical issue is not just volume. It is that the identity lifecycle is distributed across tools and teams, so no single control point sees the full picture.

Practical implication: map machine identity creation points and ownership before trying to tighten permissions.

Visibility and auditability for non-human identities

Visibility is the prerequisite for machine identity governance because you cannot secure what you cannot enumerate. In this context, visibility means knowing how many identities exist, where they authenticate, what they access, and which human or system owns them. Auditability goes one step further by preserving enough context to explain why the identity exists and whether its current access is still justified. When those two elements are missing, organisations end up with persistent access that cannot be confidently reviewed or retired. That is why machine identities become a governance gap rather than just a technical inventory problem.

Practical implication: build a machine identity inventory that includes ownership, permissions, dependencies, and retirement status.

Persistent privilege and lateral movement risk

Machine identities are attractive to attackers because persistent access can survive beyond the compromise of a human account, and overprivileged service accounts can provide broad reach across systems. Once an attacker gains a foothold through a human account or another compromised path, machine identity misuse can turn that foothold into wider movement. The important detail is that the access often looks legitimate to control systems because it belongs to a sanctioned workload or service. That makes entitlement scope and token hygiene central to detection and containment, not just to compliance.

Practical implication: review machine identity privilege scope and remove any access that is not strictly required for service function.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker wants durable access through machine identities that can outlast human credential resets and widen movement across the environment.

1. Entry begins with compromise of a human account or other steppingstone, then the attacker uses that access to reach machine identity contexts that were not directly phished or targeted.
2. Escalation follows when overprivileged service accounts, embedded credentials, or persistent machine access allow the attacker to impersonate higher-value systems and move laterally.
3. Impact occurs when those identities provide continued reach across workloads, allowing the attacker to expand control even after initial passwords are reset.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Coupang Signing Key Breach — Unrevoked signing key credentials expose 33.7 million records after employee offboarding failure at Coupang.
• Cisco DevHub NHI breach — IntelBroker exploited exposed Cisco credentials, API tokens and keys in DevHub.

Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Machine identity governance is now a core IAM problem, not a niche cloud issue. The article correctly shows that applications, services, APIs, and automated workloads now shape access at least as much as people do. When identity programmes remain anchored to human workflows, machine identities become the hidden layer where privilege accumulates without review. The practitioner conclusion is simple: if machine identities are outside the operating model, the operating model is incomplete.

Visibility is the named concept that separates inventory from governance. Knowing that machine identities exist is not enough if teams cannot trace where they authenticate, what they can touch, and who owns them. That is the real governance gap the article points to. The implication is that entitlement control without contextual visibility will keep producing blind spots, because the team cannot govern what it cannot explain.

Persistent privilege is the structural weakness in most NHI programmes. The article’s warning about machine identities being created quickly and then left in place aligns with the broader NHI pattern of access that outlives its purpose. That access is especially dangerous when embedded in automation, because it is rarely revisited once production stability depends on it. The practitioner conclusion is that lifecycle discipline, not just access policy, must be treated as a first-order control.

Auditability depends on mapping human accountability to machine activity. The article’s insistence on linking a human user to a collection of non-human identities is an important governance marker. Without that mapping, responsibility becomes diffuse and incidents become harder to investigate or certify. In identity terms, the organisation has access but not accountability. The practitioner conclusion is to make ownership explicit before expanding machine identity use further.

Service account overreach should be treated as a governance assumption failure. The assumption that machine access is operationally fixed and therefore safe to leave alone breaks once those identities persist across development, deployment, and runtime contexts. That premise was built for stable environments, not dynamic workloads. The implication is that teams must rethink how they define acceptable persistence, because the old model silently tolerates access drift.

From our research:

• 92% of organisations expose NHIs to third parties, raising concerns about supply chain security, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• 79% of organisations have experienced secrets leaks, and 77% of those incidents resulted in tangible damage, according to NHI Mgmt Group research.
• For lifecycle depth, see Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs, which connects ownership, rotation, and offboarding to operational control.

What this signals

Machine identity sprawl will keep widening until organisations treat it as a lifecycle problem, not a tooling problem. The practical signal for IAM and PAM teams is that ownership, rotation, and offboarding must be visible in the same control plane as access approval. With 96% of organisations storing secrets outside secrets managers in vulnerable locations, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs, the next failure is usually not discovery but retention.

Accountability needs to follow the identity, not the application team alone. For programme leaders, that means linking machine identities to audit trails and named owners before the environment grows further. Top 10 NHI Issues remains a useful lens for prioritising the governance gaps that most often turn into operational incidents.

For practitioners

• Build a machine identity inventory Enumerate applications, services, APIs, and automation accounts with owner, purpose, authentication method, and downstream dependencies so you can see the real access surface.
• Tie every identity to an accountable owner Require a named human or system owner for each service account or token, and make ownership part of access review and offboarding decisions.
• Reduce persistent privilege in automation Review long-lived access used by workloads and remove permissions that are not strictly necessary for runtime operation, especially where access survives deployment changes.
• Add retirement checks to deployment and change workflows Make revocation and replacement part of release processes so machine identities do not remain valid after applications, integrations, or environments change.

Key takeaways

• Machine identities have become a parallel identity layer, and human-centric governance no longer covers their full access footprint.
• Persistent privileges, weak ownership, and limited visibility are the main reasons these identities become a governance and security problem.
• Teams need inventory, accountability, and lifecycle controls before they can claim control over machine identity risk.

Key terms

• Machine Identity: A machine identity is a non-human identity used by software, services, or workloads to authenticate and communicate. It includes service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates. In governance terms, the key issue is not existence alone but ownership, lifecycle, and the persistence of access.
• Privilege Sprawl: Privilege sprawl is the gradual accumulation of more access than an identity needs to perform its job. For machine identities, it is often hidden inside automation, deployment pipelines, and long-lived integrations. The result is broader blast radius and weaker accountability when something goes wrong.
• Auditability: Auditability is the ability to reconstruct why an identity exists, who owns it, what it can access, and whether that access is still justified. For machine identities, it depends on linking technical credentials to business context and maintaining that link across changes, incidents, and offboarding.
• Lifecycle Governance: Lifecycle governance is the set of controls that manage identity from creation through change, review, and retirement. For machine identities, it must account for programmatic creation, persistent credentials, and non-human ownership so access does not outlive the workload it supports.

What's in the full article

Commvault's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• The STRIVE discussion on how machine identities are created inside development and deployment flows.
• The practical questions Commvault uses to assess permissions, ownership, and auditability across workloads.
• The examples of how compromised human accounts can be used to impersonate machine identities.
• The closing guidance on where organisations should begin when inventory and governance are still immature.

👉 Commvault's full article adds the STRIVE discussion points, audit questions, and governance starting points.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, identity lifecycle management, and secrets management are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are responsible for identity security strategy or operational governance, it is worth exploring.