Non-human identity governance is moving into the mainstream

At a glance

What this is: This is Saviynt's take on Frost & Sullivan's 2025 Frost Radar for non-human identity solutions, with the key finding that NHI governance is becoming a mainstream security priority as identity volume and lifecycle complexity accelerate.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and governance teams now have to manage service accounts, workloads, tokens, certificates, and AI-linked identities with the same discipline used for human identity programmes.

By the numbers:

• According to Frost & Sullivan, non-human identities already outnumber human identities by more than 17 to 1 in large enterprises.
• Frost & Sullivan estimates that the global non-human identity solutions market will grow from $5 billion in 2024 to $11 billion by 2030.

👉 Read Saviynt's analysis of Frost Radar 2025 for non-human identity solutions

Context

Non-human identity governance is the discipline of discovering, controlling, and reviewing service accounts, workloads, tokens, certificates, and other machine identities across the estate. The problem is not simply that these identities exist in large numbers. It is that they are created continuously, often by automation, and can retain access long after the original operational need has passed.

Saviynt's article uses Frost & Sullivan's analysis to argue that traditional identity programmes built around employees and contractors no longer cover the full operating model of modern enterprises. That shift creates pressure on lifecycle management, visibility, and privilege controls, which is why the issue now sits alongside Zero Trust and identity security posture management. For a broader baseline, readers can compare this with the Ultimate Guide to NHIs and the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when service accounts and tokens are not governed like other identities?

A: Visibility and accountability break first, followed by access drift. When service accounts, tokens, and certificates are created continuously without lifecycle control, organisations lose track of who owns them, why they exist, and when they should be removed. That creates persistent access paths that audits often miss until something goes wrong.

Q: Why do non-human identities complicate Zero Trust programmes?

A: Because Zero Trust assumes access can be continuously verified and constrained, while machine identities are often created in bulk, reused across systems, and left with standing permissions. If ownership, expiry, and intended use are unclear, the programme cannot reliably enforce least privilege at machine speed.

Q: How do security teams know if NHI governance is actually working?

A: Look for complete discovery, clear ownership, timely deprovisioning, and a measurable reduction in unused or overprivileged machine identities. If identities are still appearing outside approved workflows or retaining access after they should have been retired, governance is not keeping pace with the environment.

Q: Should organisations converge human IAM, PAM, and NHI governance?

A: Yes, when the same programme needs to govern people, service accounts, and other machine identities under one ownership and certification model. Separate control planes create blind spots, duplicated policy logic, and inconsistent revocation. Convergence gives teams one place to apply lifecycle, privilege, and review discipline.

Technical breakdown

Why NHI scale breaks manual governance models

Non-human identities behave differently from human accounts because they are generated by systems, pipelines, and integrations at machine speed. A single application can create service accounts, API tokens, certificates, and ephemeral workloads across cloud and hybrid environments, while ownership is split across DevOps, IT, and security teams. Manual inventories cannot keep pace with that churn, so visibility gaps become structural rather than accidental. In practice, discovery and classification must be automated or the identity estate will drift faster than review cycles can catch it.

Practical implication: replace periodic spreadsheet-based tracking with automated discovery and classification across all NHI sources.

How excess privileges persist in machine identity lifecycles

Machine identities often accumulate access over time because they are created for a task and then left in place after the task changes. Without lifecycle controls, permissions remain attached to long-lived credentials, and those credentials can outlive the system, project, or owner that justified them. This is the same governance failure that zero standing privilege is meant to address, but the challenge is sharper for NHIs because there is no natural offboarding event like an employee departure. Identity governance has to account for persistent access drift, not just initial provisioning.

Practical implication: tie NHI access to explicit lifecycle states, with deprovisioning and review triggers when the business purpose changes.

Zero standing privilege for NHI and human identities

Zero standing privilege means access should not remain permanently available when it can be provisioned on demand. For NHIs, that principle is especially relevant because excessive access may sit dormant until an attacker, misconfiguration, or compromised integration turns it into a broad blast radius. Frost & Sullivan's framing suggests that organisations are starting to apply the same rigor to machine identity as they do to workforce identity, which is the right direction for converged governance models. The key is not only removing standing access but also proving who owns each identity and why it exists.

Practical implication: enforce just-in-time or time-bound access for high-risk NHI entitlements and review ownership continuously.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker aims to abuse persistent machine identity access to move through systems that were never meant to remain broadly reachable.

1. Entry occurs when service accounts, API tokens, certificates, or ephemeral workloads are created across cloud and hybrid environments without a reliable central inventory.
2. Escalation follows when excess permissions accumulate and long-lived credentials retain access after the original business need has changed.
3. Impact emerges when stale or overprivileged machine identities are misused, compromised, or left available as a broad path into core systems.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Sisense breach — unauthorized GitLab access led to exfiltration of access tokens, API keys and certificates.
• Salesloft OAuth token breach — hackers stole OAuth tokens to access Salesforce data via Salesloft.

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 governance is no longer a niche control problem, it is a structural identity programme issue. Frost & Sullivan's assessment reflects what practitioners already see in the field: machine identities now represent a large and fast-changing share of enterprise access. The governance challenge is not limited to one cloud or one tool because these identities span DevOps pipelines, SaaS integrations, and hybrid infrastructure. That makes NHI oversight a board-level identity concern, not a back-office inventory task.

Identity convergence is becoming the default response to machine identity sprawl. The article points toward a market where separate treatment of human IAM, privileged access, and NHI controls becomes harder to justify. Once service accounts, tokens, and certificates are governed in a fragmented way, teams lose the ability to apply consistent ownership, certification, and deprovisioning rules. Practitioners should expect identity governance platforms to be judged by how well they unify these controls across actor types.

Lifecycle failure is the real control gap behind most NHI risk. The article highlights scale, excess access, and fragmented ownership, which all point to the same governance weakness: identities are created faster than they are retired. This is where the Ultimate Guide to NHIs and the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide remain directly relevant, because the real issue is not merely discovery but the ability to prove why an identity still needs access. Organisations that cannot answer that question will keep carrying unnecessary privilege.

Zero standing privilege is moving from an access pattern to a governance expectation. Frost & Sullivan's framing suggests that permanent access is increasingly out of step with how modern systems operate. The market signal is clear: controls built for stable, human-paced access reviews are being asked to govern ephemeral machine access and AI-linked execution paths. Practitioners should treat that as a programme redesign problem, not a tuning exercise.

Named concept: identity drift debt. Machine identities accumulate permissions, ownership ambiguity, and retirement lag as systems change faster than governance processes can absorb. That debt compounds until access review, offboarding, and certification no longer reflect actual usage. The implication for practitioners is that identity security must measure and reduce drift continuously, not only during audits.

From our research:

• 90% of IT leaders say properly managing NHIs is essential for a successful zero-trust implementation, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which explains why machine identity governance keeps failing at scale.
• For the lifecycle angle, see NHI Lifecycle Management Guide for provisioning, rotation, and offboarding discipline.

What this signals

Identity drift debt: as machine identities accumulate faster than governance processes can retire them, the real risk becomes the gap between current usage and approved entitlement. That gap is what turns NHI management from an inventory exercise into an operating model issue, especially in environments that mix cloud, SaaS, and CI/CD.

With 96% of organisations storing secrets outside secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools, the programme signal is clear: discovery alone is not enough, because credential placement is still defining the attack surface. Teams should align NHI controls with NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 functions to make ownership, protection, and recovery measurable.

Converged identity governance is likely to become the baseline expectation rather than a niche architecture choice. Teams that still separate human IAM, PAM, and NHI control logic will find that lifecycle events, certification, and revocation decisions are increasingly evaluated as one continuous governance problem, not three separate ones.

For practitioners

• Automate NHI discovery and classification Build continuous discovery across cloud, SaaS, CI/CD, and on-premises sources so service accounts, tokens, certificates, and workloads are inventoried without manual reconciliation.
• Link access to explicit lifecycle states Require provisioning, review, and deprovisioning events for every machine identity so access changes when the business purpose changes, not when someone remembers to remove it.
• Apply zero standing privilege to high-risk entitlements Use time-bound or just-in-time controls for privileged machine identities and verify that long-lived credentials are not granting persistent access to critical systems.
• Assign named ownership for every machine identity Record an accountable owner for each service account, token, or certificate and make ownership part of access review and offboarding workflows.

Key takeaways

• Non-human identity risk is now a governance problem, not just a tooling problem, because machine identities are proliferating faster than manual review can track.
• The market data points to a structural shift toward converged identity controls, with Zero Trust and lifecycle governance becoming central to NHI strategy.
• Practitioners should focus on automated discovery, explicit ownership, and time-bound privilege if they want NHI programmes to keep pace with modern infrastructure.

Key terms

• Non-Human Identity: A non-human identity is any digital identity used by software rather than a person. It includes service accounts, API keys, tokens, certificates, workloads, and AI agents when they act on their own behalf in systems that require authentication and access control.
• Zero Standing Privilege: Zero standing privilege is an access model where privileged access is not left permanently available. For machine identities, this means access should be granted only when needed, scoped tightly to the task, and removed as soon as the task is complete.
• Identity Drift: Identity drift is the gradual gap between approved access and actual access over time. In NHI environments, it usually appears when accounts are created quickly, reused across services, or never fully retired, causing permissions and ownership to move out of sync with current need.

What's in the full article

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

• The Frost Radar positioning criteria and the vendor's own read on why it was evaluated as a leader.
• The specific product capabilities Frost & Sullivan highlighted across discovery, risk assessment, and lifecycle governance.
• The market-growth context behind the 2025 NHI category and how the report frames consolidation.
• The vendor's referenced feature set for converged identity governance across human and non-human identities.

👉 The full Saviynt post covers the report's market framing, capability notes, and leadership context.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity security 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 governance maturity, it is worth exploring.