TL;DR: Machine identities now outnumber human identities in many environments, and Commvault argues that governance, visibility, and auditability have not kept pace with how applications, services, APIs, and automated workloads actually operate. The result is persistent privilege sprawl, weak accountability, and a security model that still assumes human-paced lifecycle controls are enough.
At a glance
What this is: Commvault’s discussion argues that machine identities have outgrown human-centric governance, leaving organisations with blind spots around creation, privilege, and accountability.
Why it matters: IAM, PAM, and NHI teams need to treat machine identity visibility and lifecycle control as operational controls, because persistent access and unclear ownership widen blast radius across modern systems.
Context
Machine identities are non-human accounts used by applications, services, APIs, and automated workloads to authenticate and move work through modern systems. The governance gap appears when those identities are created dynamically but still expected to fit human-style access review and offboarding processes.
Commvault argues that the operational model has changed faster than identity governance. Access may be embedded in systems, persist beyond the original task, and remain difficult to audit because the human owner, the machine credential, and the runtime behaviour are not managed as one accountable unit.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when organisations manage machine identities like user accounts?
A: The programme loses visibility, ownership, and lifecycle control. Machine identities do not follow human onboarding, MFA, or password-reset patterns, so user-first processes miss the real control points. That leads to orphaned credentials, weak attribution, and a larger attack surface than the access review process is able to detect.
Q: Why do third-party credentials increase lateral movement risk?
A: Third-party credentials increase lateral movement risk because they often bridge into multiple systems, clients, or cloud services with more privilege than a normal user account. If the same password or token is reused, one compromise can unlock several environments. The risk rises sharply when access is persistent, delegated, or poorly scoped to a single business task.
Q: How do security teams know whether machine identity governance is working?
A: They know it is working when every non-human credential has a named owner, a visible system scope, and a documented retirement path. If access reviews cannot answer when the identity was last used or why it still exists, governance is only partial. High confidence comes from evidence of cleanup, not just policy coverage.
Q: Who should be accountable for machine identity lifecycle management?
A: Accountability should sit with the platform or application owner who benefits from the identity, supported by IAM, security, and operations teams. If nobody owns rotation, offboarding, and review, the credential will outlive the system it was meant to support. Lifecycle control is only real when revocation is assigned and tested.
Technical breakdown
Why machine identity lifecycle breaks human IAM assumptions
Human IAM assumes a stable subject, explicit onboarding, and a clean offboarding event. Machine identities do not behave that way. They are often created by deployment pipelines, cloud services, or application code, then reused across systems with limited visibility into who approved them, who owns them, or when they should be retired. That means classic joiner-mover-leaver processes and periodic access reviews often arrive too late or inspect the wrong object. The practical issue is not just volume; it is that the identity exists as part of runtime architecture rather than as a discrete person record.
Practical implication: map machine identities to explicit owners and lifecycle events before you try to certify their access.
How persistent privilege turns machine identities into a blast-radius problem
Privilege sprawl in NHI environments is usually more dangerous than in human access because machine credentials are embedded in automation and continue operating until something breaks. If an application token, service account, or API credential carries broad permissions, the access may persist long after the original business need has changed. That turns each credential into a latent movement path. The article’s core point is that machine identities are not just numerous; they are frequently overprovisioned and under-reviewed, which makes recovery harder once an attacker or malfunctioning workload abuses them.
Practical implication: inventory standing permissions on machine identities and identify where access outlives the task it was meant to support.
Why visibility is the prerequisite for machine identity governance
Visibility is the control layer that tells teams what exists, where it connects, and how it behaves. Without that, governance becomes guesswork, because you cannot confidently reduce access you cannot trace. For machine identities, visibility needs to include ownership, usage patterns, dependencies, and the human account linked to the non-human estate for accountability. That linkage matters because auditors and responders need a clean answer to who is responsible when a machine identity is overprivileged, stale, or abused. In practice, governance fails first as an inventory problem and only then as a policy problem.
Practical implication: build a machine identity inventory that links each credential to a human owner, system context, and business purpose.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: The attacker wants to convert one human compromise into durable machine-identity privilege that enables broad movement across the environment.
- Entry begins when attackers compromise a human account through social engineering and use that foothold to reach privileged non-human access paths.
- Credential access follows as overprivileged service accounts, pass-the-hash, or similar abuse lets the attacker impersonate machine identities and operate with elevated permissions.
- Lateral movement then extends across connected systems because those credentials are embedded in workflows and are not tightly scoped to one task.
- Impact occurs when the attacker retains access even after passwords are reset, enabling persistent movement across systems and broader compromise.
Breaches seen in the wild
- Dropbox Sign breach 2024: A compromised back-end service account gave attackers Dropbox Sign customer data, including API keys, OAuth tokens and MFA information.
- Commvault Metallic breach 2025: A nation-state actor exploited a Commvault zero-day in Azure and may have taken app secrets that open customers' Microsoft 365 tenants.
Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 200+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.
NHI Mgmt Group analysis
Human-era identity governance is no longer the default control model for modern environments. Machine identities are now part of the primary operating fabric, not a side category of technical accounts. That changes the governance problem from user access administration to accountability across applications, services, APIs, and automated workloads. The practitioner conclusion is that identity programmes must govern the entity that actually executes work, not just the person who requested it.
Privilege sprawl is more damaging in machine identity estates because access is persistent, embedded, and rarely questioned. Human users can be chased through approval workflows; machine identities often sit inside system logic and inherit breadth that no reviewer revisits. This is why the issue is not only excess privilege, but privilege that survives process changes. The practical conclusion is that access reduction must be driven by runtime reality, not by provisioning assumptions.
Visibility before control is the right sequencing for machine identity governance. The article is clear that organisations cannot answer basic questions about how many machine identities exist, where they are created, and how they are used. Without that baseline, controls become reactive and can break business workflows. The practitioner conclusion is that inventory, ownership, and relationship mapping are the foundation of accountable NHI governance.
Human ownership must be explicitly mapped to machine identity collections if auditability is to mean anything. A machine identity may execute the action, but a human owner still has to carry responsibility for approval, purpose, and review. That makes accountability a governance design problem, not an afterthought. The practitioner conclusion is that auditability fails when the human-to-machine relationship is implicit rather than recorded.
Machine identity governance is becoming a blast-radius discipline. The decisive question is no longer whether a credential exists, but how far it can move if abused. That shifts security thinking toward scope, dependency, and persistence instead of simple authentication events. The practitioner conclusion is that the real control objective is to shrink what any one machine identity can touch.
From our research library:
- NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Read next: Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Why NHI Security Matters Now
What this signals
Machine identity governance now needs to behave like an operational control, not a periodic review exercise. The practical shift is from asking whether access was approved to asking whether a credential still has the right reach at runtime. In programme terms, that means identity inventory, ownership, and linkage to business purpose have to sit ahead of certification cycles, not behind them.
Privilege sprawl becomes more consequential when credentials are embedded in systems that never stop running. Once access is part of automation, the usual assumptions about periodic review and clean offboarding lose force. Teams should expect governance to move toward continual visibility of where credentials are created, reused, and allowed to persist.
For practitioners
- Inventory every machine identity Build a complete register of applications, services, APIs, and automated workloads that authenticate without human interaction, then record where each identity is created and why it exists.
- Map each credential to a human owner Assign an accountable human owner to every non-human identity so review, remediation, and incident response have a clear decision-maker.
- Review standing access on machine identities Identify service accounts and tokens that retain permissions beyond the business task they support, especially where those permissions cross system boundaries.
- Reduce embedded privilege in automation Tighten the permissions carried by deployment and runtime identities so automated workflows can complete their task without broad environment-wide reach.
- Track where machine identities connect and persist Document dependency chains and reuse patterns so teams can see which credentials are reused across environments and which links create hidden escalation paths.
Key takeaways
- Machine identities have outgrown human-centric governance, and that mismatch leaves organisations unable to explain who owns access or why it still exists.
- The security issue is not only scale. It is persistent, embedded privilege that can carry access well beyond the original task or approval point.
- The control gap closes when teams inventory machine identities, assign human ownership, and reduce standing access before abuse or drift occurs.
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 and MITRE ATT&CK address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and CIS Controls v8 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | The article centres on machine identities carrying persistent excess access beyond their need. |
| NHI-08 — Environment Isolation | The article shows machine identities crossing systems in ways that blur environment boundaries. | |
| Recommendation — Audit machine identity permissions for scope creep and remove any access that exceeds the task. Separate machine identities by environment and prevent credentials from operating across unrelated contexts. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | The core governance issue is uncontrolled permissions and weak entitlement visibility. |
| Recommendation — Maintain an authoritative entitlement inventory and review non-human access against business purpose. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-5 — Account Management | The article is fundamentally about unmanaged accounts, ownership, and lifecycle gaps. |
| Recommendation — Enforce account ownership, approval, and periodic review for machine identities and service accounts. | ||
| MITRE ATT&CK | TA0006;TA0008 — Credential Access; Lateral Movement | The episode describes attackers using compromised access to move across systems through machine identities. |
| Recommendation — Map abuse of machine identities to credential access and lateral movement to prioritise detections. | ||
Key terms
- Machine Identity: The digital identity of a machine, device, or workload, such as a server, container, or VM, used to authenticate it within a network. Sometimes used interchangeably with NHI, though NHI is the broader category.
- Privilege Sprawl: Privilege sprawl is the accumulation of access rights beyond what is needed for a task or role. It often develops quietly across service accounts, tokens, and delegated access paths, which makes it a major source of hidden risk in both workforce IAM and NHI governance.
- Auditability: Auditability is the ability to reconstruct who or what acted, what permissions were used, and what data or tools were touched. For AI and NHI governance, it is the minimum evidence needed to investigate incidents, validate controls, and prove that autonomous actions stayed within approved scope.
- Runtime Visibility: The ability to observe what an AI client actually accessed, which tools it used, and how it behaved during a session. It is more useful than entitlement snapshots for agent governance because it captures executed reality, not just approved access.
Deepen your knowledge
NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity lifecycle are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building or maturing an IAM programme, it is worth exploring.
Published by the NHIMG editorial team on July 9, 2026.
Updated on October 11, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org