Secrets and NHI convergence is reshaping identity security

At a glance

What this is: This analysis says secrets management and NHI management are converging because enterprises now need to govern machine identities, credentials, certificates, keys, and privileged access together.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, IGA, and PAM teams can no longer treat credentials as separate from identity lifecycle, especially when automation and AI expand the non-human estate.

👉 Read Akeyless's analysis of secrets and NHI convergence

Context

The security gap is no longer just about where secrets are stored. The harder problem is that machine identities now depend on those credentials for authentication, authorization, and lifecycle control across cloud, CI/CD, and AI-driven systems.

Akeyless frames this shift as a convergence between secrets management and non-human identity management. For IAM practitioners, the practical implication is that access governance increasingly has to cover the identity and the credential that makes the identity usable.

This is not a theory-only pattern. The article presents the current posture as a market-wide response to growing machine identity sprawl, where traditional team boundaries between secrets, certificates, and privileged access are becoming less defensible.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when secret managers are treated as the whole NHI programme?

A: The programme loses sight of identities that are created, stored, or consumed outside the vault, including cloud roles, Kubernetes secrets, and CI variables. That breaks ownership, recertification, and revocation because no single system holds the full lifecycle picture. The result is a partial inventory that cannot support real governance or fast incident response.

Q: When should IAM teams prioritise unified control over secrets, certificates, and machine identities?

A: They should prioritise it when the same workloads, pipelines, or services depend on multiple credential types and are changing faster than manual review can keep up. In that environment, separate tools create governance gaps because no single team can prove ownership, usage, and revocation across the full lifecycle.

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

A: Look for evidence that each service account has a current owner, a narrow purpose, a short credential lifetime, and a clear retirement path. If any of those are missing, the programme may appear controlled on paper while still leaving durable access paths in production.

Q: How should security teams govern AI-assisted work that inherits human credentials?

A: Treat it as a delegated identity path, not a simple user session. Security teams should map the human, service account, and agent involved, then monitor the sequence of actions, the tools used, and the systems reached. That lets teams detect when authorised activity drifts into a higher-risk behavioural pattern before containment becomes impossible.

Technical breakdown

Why secrets and NHI controls are converging

Secrets management answers where credentials live and how they are protected. NHI management answers what those credentials are bound to, who owns them, and when they should be rotated, revoked, or replaced. In modern environments, the same service account may depend on an API key, a certificate, and a token across different workflows, which makes the control problem inseparable. The architecture challenge is that a vault alone does not govern identity lifecycle, while identity tooling alone does not protect the underlying credential material. Practical governance now has to span issuance, rotation, usage, and offboarding as one chain.

Practical implication: align secrets inventory, machine identity ownership, and revocation logic under one operating model.

How machine identity sprawl changes runtime access

Machine identities are often ephemeral, distributed, and created by systems rather than people. That means access is increasingly established at runtime, not at provisioning time, and may be consumed by containers, CI/CD pipelines, APIs, or AI systems before a human ever reviews it. The technical issue is not just volume. It is that runtime access patterns now determine whether a credential is visible, auditable, and removable in time. If governance only happens at the vault or directory layer, the organisation may still miss how credentials are actually used in execution paths.

Practical implication: map runtime credential use to the systems that request it, not just to the vault that stores it.

What unified lifecycle control means for certificates and keys

Certificates and encryption keys sit in the same lifecycle problem space as passwords, API keys, and tokens when they are used to establish trust for non-human actors. Their security depends on ownership, expiry, rotation, and revocation, not just cryptographic strength. The article’s core signal is that modern identity security is moving toward shared governance of the full credential stack, because a machine identity can fail through stale certificates just as easily as through leaked secrets. That makes lifecycle discipline the architectural control plane, not an operational afterthought.

Practical implication: treat certificate and key lifecycle as part of identity governance, not as a separate crypto task.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker wants durable access to systems and sensitive resources through a credentialed machine identity that looks legitimate to normal controls.

1. Entry occurs when a machine identity obtains valid credentials through a secret, certificate, token, or key that has not been tightly governed.
2. Escalation follows when that standing credential is reused across pipelines, workloads, or services and opens broader access than the original use case justified.
3. Impact occurs when the compromised or over-scoped non-human identity is used to reach sensitive infrastructure, data, or privileged control paths.

Breaches seen in the wild

• BeyondTrust breach 2024: A stolen BeyondTrust Remote Support API key let a China state-sponsored actor reset accounts and reach US Treasury workstations in 2024.

Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 150+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Secrets and NHI are now one governance problem: The article reflects a structural change in identity security, not just a category overlap. When machine identities depend on secrets, certificates, and keys to operate, the credential lifecycle becomes part of identity governance rather than a separate storage problem. Practitioners should stop designing separate control planes for assets that fail together.

Runtime access is the new control boundary: The important question is no longer only where a secret is kept, but where it is consumed and whether that use is still justified. In cloud-native and automated environments, the real risk sits in the execution path, where identities are created, used, and forgotten faster than review cycles can react. That means governance has to move closer to issuance and runtime authorisation.

Lifecycle drift is the hidden failure mode: Machine identities become dangerous when ownership, revocation, and expiry drift apart from actual use. A secret that is still valid after the workload or integration changed is not just stale, it is unmanaged authority. The implication is that offboarding, rotation, and certificate expiry need to be treated as identity control failures, not housekeeping tasks.

Unified identity security is becoming the default architecture: The market signal here is that organisations are moving away from siloed secrets and NHI tools because the boundary between them no longer matches how modern systems operate. That does not mean every platform claim is equal. It does mean identity teams should evaluate whether their controls govern the whole credential-to-identity lifecycle rather than isolated fragments.

Ephemeral credential trust debt: Short-lived credentials still create governance debt when their issuance, ownership, and disposal are not tracked as one lifecycle. Ephemeral access reduces exposure time, but it does not remove the need to prove who or what received it, why it existed, and when it ceased to matter. Practitioners should treat every temporary credential as accountable authority, not disposable convenience.

From our research library:

• Organisations maintain an average of 6 distinct secrets manager instances, creating fragmentation that undermines centralised control, according to the State of Secrets in AppSec.
• Enterprises manage far more machine secrets than human ones: 20 times as many according to Enterprise Strategy Group, and 45 times according to GitGuardian.
• Read next: Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks

What this signals

Unified credential governance is becoming the operating model: Teams that still separate secrets, certificates, and NHI ownership will keep discovering that the same credential can be protected in one system and misused in another. The programme-level shift is toward one lifecycle view of machine access, because fragmented ownership is now the main source of control failure.

Machine identity governance is expanding beyond storage: The real control question is not whether a secret exists in a vault, but whether the identity that uses it is still valid, scoped, and offboarded correctly. That is why lifecycle evidence matters as much as rotation evidence in modern IAM and PAM programmes. according to the State of Secrets in AppSec

Identity blast radius: Once a machine identity gains access to multiple systems through one credential chain, the security boundary is no longer the vault. Practitioners need to think in terms of identity blast radius, because one over-scoped token can link storage, runtime, and privileged access into the same failure path.

For practitioners

• Map the machine identity estate Build a single inventory of service accounts, application identities, API keys, certificates, and tokens, then assign ownership and business purpose for each.
• Unify rotation and revocation workflows Tie secret rotation, certificate renewal, and key revocation to the same lifecycle events so stale credentials cannot survive a workload change or offboarding event.
• Audit runtime credential use Trace where credentials are consumed in CI/CD, cloud workloads, containers, and AI-driven workflows so governance reflects actual execution paths.
• Separate privilege by credential purpose Limit each machine identity to the smallest credential set needed for one workload or integration, and remove shared reuse across unrelated systems.
• Review governance for autonomous consumers If AI systems or autonomous workflows consume credentials, require the same ownership, expiry, and offboarding discipline you apply to other machine identities.

Key takeaways

• The article shows that secrets management and NHI governance are converging into one operational discipline for machine identities.
• The scale problem is structural, with machine identities relying on multiple credential types across cloud, automation, and AI workflows.
• Teams need unified lifecycle control so ownership, rotation, revocation, and runtime use are managed together.

Key terms

• Machine identity lifecycle: Machine identity lifecycle is the full governance process for a non-human identity from creation to retirement. It includes provisioning, access scoping, rotation, renewal, offboarding, and auditability, and it fails when any one of those steps is handled manually or inconsistently.
• Shared Credential Governance: The management of a single account or password used by multiple people. In mature environments, this includes named-user attribution, controlled disclosure, rotation, and explicit offboarding because the application cannot distinguish users on its own.
• Runtime access governance: Runtime access governance is the practice of deciding and enforcing access based on current execution context rather than only on static assignment. For autonomous or semi-autonomous actors, it requires time-bound permissions, audit trails, and revocation logic that can keep up with live action.
• Ephemeral Credentials: Ephemeral credentials are short-lived access artefacts issued for a limited task or session. They reduce the window for abuse, but they only improve security when paired with strong scope limits, telemetry, and automatic revocation at task completion.

What's in the full article

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

• KuppingerCole recognition details across the Enterprise Secrets Management and Non-Human Identity Management reports
• The vendor's description of its unified control plane for secrets, certificates, keys, and privileged access
• Architectural claims around Distributed Fragments Cryptography and Zero-Knowledge storage
• The article's discussion of how AI-driven systems change machine identity governance requirements

👉 The full Akeyless article covers the KuppingerCole context, architecture claims, and governance implications in more detail.

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.