Non-human identities will dominate 2025 IAM planning

At a glance

What this is: Entro Security argues that 2025 IAM planning will be shaped by the rapid growth of non-human identities, which it says are heading toward a 100 to 1 ratio versus human identities.

Why it matters: IAM and security teams need to treat NHIs as a first-class governance problem because discovery, lifecycle control and access policy now determine whether machine access becomes an attack surface.

By the numbers:

• NHIs are on track to outnumber human identities by 100 to 1 in enterprise environments.

Context

Non-human identity sprawl is the security gap behind this article. API keys, service accounts and cloud tokens are now foundational to cloud operations, SaaS integrations and development pipelines, but they are still governed far less consistently than human accounts.

For IAM teams, the practical issue is not just volume. When machine access grows faster than inventory, rotation and offboarding processes, the organisation loses control over who or what can act in its environment, when that access exists and how long it persists.

Key questions

Q: How should teams govern non-human identities in AI-heavy environments?

A: Teams should govern non-human identities the same way they govern other privileged assets: assign ownership, minimise scope, rotate credentials regularly, and monitor for abnormal use. The key difference is speed. AI-driven workflows can exploit exposed access quickly, so detection and revocation must be automated and tied to lifecycle controls.

Q: What problem does ownership attribution solve for service accounts and API keys?

A: It closes the gap between exposure detection and accountable remediation. Many organisations can find the secret, but not the human who introduced it, maintains it, or can safely replace it. Ownership attribution gives security teams a practical way to assign action without relying on informal knowledge that disappears during staff changes.

Q: What are the signs that NHI governance is failing in an enterprise?

A: Common warning signs include unclear ownership for service accounts, secrets stored in code or configuration instead of managed vaults, infrequent rotation, and weak offboarding of API keys. Other red flags are excessive permissions, third-party exposure without controls, and low visibility into where non-human identities exist or how they are used across the stack.

Q: How should security teams govern machine identities in zero trust environments?

A: Security teams should govern machine identities with the same discipline used for privileged human access: inventory, ownership, policy-based approval, rotation, monitoring, and revocation. Zero trust only works when every non-human credential has a known purpose and a short, enforceable lifecycle. Without that, machine access becomes a hidden standing privilege layer inside the environment.

Technical breakdown

Why NHI inventory breaks before policy does

Non-human identities become hard to govern when discovery lags creation. Unlike human accounts, service accounts, API keys and cloud tokens are often created by developers, automation or third-party integrations without a clear central approval path. That means the security team may never see the full estate, and policy can only be enforced against what is already known. The result is not simply a visibility problem. It is a lifecycle problem where access exists before ownership, classification and monitoring are in place. Practical implication: build continuous discovery around NHI creation points, not periodic reviews of a partial inventory.

Practical implication: build continuous discovery around NHI creation points, not periodic reviews of a partial inventory.

How AI changes detection for machine identities

The article’s AI point is about scale and anomaly detection, not autonomous identity behaviour. When hundreds or thousands of NHIs generate traffic, static rule sets struggle to distinguish normal integration behaviour from risky access patterns. AI-assisted analytics can correlate location, sequence and timing to identify unusual requests, but only if the underlying identity data is complete and current. This shifts the control from reactive alerting to behavioural baselining for machine access. Practical implication: use anomaly detection to flag out-of-pattern NHI behaviour, but treat it as a complement to lifecycle governance rather than a substitute.

Practical implication: use anomaly detection to flag out-of-pattern NHI behaviour, but treat it as a complement to lifecycle governance rather than a substitute.

Why zero trust for NHIs depends on secret hygiene

Zero trust for non-human identities is not a slogan, it is an access design problem. The article links strong IAM, continuous authentication, granular permissions and secret rotation because NHIs often authenticate through reusable credentials that can outlive their original purpose. If tokens and keys are not rotated, scoped and revoked on time, the trust boundary becomes the secret itself rather than the workload or service using it. Practical implication: align zero-trust design with credential lifecycle controls so that machine access can be revalidated, narrowed and removed as usage changes.

Practical implication: align zero-trust design with credential lifecycle controls so that machine access can be revalidated, narrowed and removed as usage changes.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker wants to use weakly governed machine credentials to reach cloud and application workflows that support core business operations.

1. Attackers benefit when non-human identities are created faster than they are inventoried, because unused or poorly governed keys, tokens and service accounts remain available for abuse. Poor discovery creates the first opening.
2. Once an NHI credential is exposed or overlooked, standing access can be used to reach cloud operations, SaaS integrations or development pipelines without the friction normally attached to human accounts. That widens the blast radius of a single credential.
3. The end state is compromise of business-critical machine access that can be used for persistence, data access or further movement through connected systems.

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.
• Cisco Active Directory credentials leak 2025: Kraken leaked Cisco Active Directory hashes, including service and krbtgt accounts; Cisco says they came from its 2022 breach, not a new one.

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

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

NHI lifecycle management is becoming the control plane for enterprise IAM. The article is right to put discovery, inventory, creation-time governance and offboarding ahead of point-in-time protection. When NHIs are multiplying faster than the organisation can classify them, lifecycle discipline becomes the only durable way to know what exists and who owns it. Practitioners should treat NHI lifecycle management as a core IAM programme, not a side task.

The 100 to 1 ratio is not just a volume story, it is an accountability story. Once machine identities far outnumber humans, manual governance assumptions stop scaling. A human-centric access review process cannot keep pace with identities created by pipelines, integrations and automation. The implication is that governance must move closer to issuance, ownership and revocation events rather than relying on periodic recertification alone.

Zero trust for NHIs fails when secrets are treated as static trust anchors. Granular permissions and continuous authentication help only if credentials are rotated, scoped and revoked with the same discipline as the workload they enable. The control gap is not lack of policy language, but lack of lifecycle enforcement for the secret itself. Security teams should think in terms of credential blast radius, not just network segmentation.

AI-assisted detection should sharpen NHI governance, not replace it. The article’s AI theme is about helping teams identify unusual access patterns across large machine estates, which is useful when traditional controls are overwhelmed. But anomaly detection cannot correct missing ownership, poor offboarding or stale secrets. The practitioner conclusion is clear: use AI to surface risk faster, then back it with explicit NHI governance.

Non-human identity sprawl is now an enterprise governance problem, not a niche cloud issue. API keys, service accounts and cloud tokens sit in the operational path of modern business, which means their failure modes affect IAM, PAM, application security and cloud operations together. Teams should stop asking whether NHIs are important and start asking which governance layer currently owns them.

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

NHI sprawl is becoming a governance design problem. When machine identities proliferate faster than the surrounding controls, periodic review cycles stop being enough. Practitioners need to shift from account-centric administration to lifecycle-centric governance, where issuance, rotation and revocation are managed as one control surface.

Secret lifecycle is the practical hinge in zero-trust design for NHIs. If credentials remain valid long after they should have been withdrawn, continuous authentication becomes an incomplete promise. That is why teams should connect discovery, ownership and secret rotation into the same operating model rather than treating them as separate workstreams.

For practitioners

• Map your full NHI estate Build a continuous inventory of API keys, service accounts, cloud tokens and other machine identities from the systems where they are created and used.
• Tie ownership to issuance and offboarding Assign an accountable owner for every NHI and make revocation part of the same lifecycle process that creates the credential.
• Reduce standing trust in machine access Scope permissions tightly, rotate secrets regularly and remove credentials that no longer have an active business purpose.
• Use anomaly detection for machine behaviour Baseline expected NHI access patterns and alert on unfamiliar locations, unexpected request sequences or unusual integration activity.
• Adapt zero-trust controls for NHIs Apply continuous authentication and granular authorisation to machine identities so access is revalidated as usage changes.

Key takeaways

• Non-human identities are moving from background infrastructure to a primary IAM governance problem as their volume overtakes human accounts.
• The central risk is not only scale but weak lifecycle control, especially where machine credentials are created, used and forgotten across pipelines and integrations.
• Teams that want better control need continuous discovery, named ownership, revocation discipline and zero-trust credential handling for NHIs.

Key terms

• Non-Human Identity (NHI): A digital identity assigned to a non-human entity such as a software application, service account, API key, bot, machine, or AI agent that enables it to authenticate and interact with systems without direct human involvement. NHIs now outnumber human identities in most enterprises by 25 to 50 times.
• NHI Lifecycle Management: The end-to-end governance of a non-human identity from creation and onboarding through active management, monitoring, credential rotation, and secure decommissioning.
• Secrets Rotation: Secrets rotation is the practice of replacing credentials on a schedule or after an event so exposed values stop working quickly. In NHI programmes, rotation must be tied to ownership and automation, otherwise credentials remain valid long after teams believe the risk has been addressed.
• Zero Trust: A security model that assumes no identity, human or non-human, should be trusted by default, even inside a network perimeter. Every access request must be verified, authorised, and continuously validated.

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 responsible for identity security strategy or NHI governance in your organisation, it is worth exploring.