How to Secure Machine Identities: Best Practices Beyond the Traditional Approach

Read full article here: https://www.sailpoint.com/identity-library/protect-machine-identities/?utm_source=nhimg

For decades, enterprises have mastered human identity governance. We’ve built structured onboarding processes, role-based access models, and certification cycles designed around how employees work. But when it comes to machine identities — service accounts, API keys, bots, and certificates — these playbooks fall apart.

And that’s a problem, because machine identities have quietly become the foundation of modern enterprise operations. Today, many organizations manage 10x more machine identities than human ones. They underpin automation, CI/CD, cloud services, and APIs. Yet most remain poorly governed, if at all.

The result: an unmanaged attack surface that adversaries increasingly exploit.

Why Traditional Methods Don’t Work

Human identity governance is built around a predictable lifecycle: hire → role change → termination. Machines don’t follow that script. They spin up and down automatically, scale across multi-cloud environments, and often run high-privilege operations autonomously.

Legacy approaches buckle under this reality:

• Manual tracking → spreadsheets and outdated repositories can’t keep up with ephemeral workloads. Orphaned accounts linger unnoticed.
• Long-lived credentials → hardcoded secrets and static keys offer attackers a permanent backdoor.
• Perimeter-based security → once “inside,” service accounts move laterally unchecked. Zero trust rarely extends to NHIs.
• Human IAM retrofitted for machines → workflows like manager approvals or HR-driven lifecycle changes don’t apply to bots and service accounts. Complexity rises, governance fails.

Real-World Consequence: The Forgotten Account

Consider a retail company using an analytics platform tied to a database via a service account. Created five years ago by a now-departed developer, the account had never been reviewed, rotated, or assigned ownership.

An attacker exploited a separate phishing breach, discovered the stale service account, and used it to exfiltrate sensitive customer data undetected.

Because the account wasn’t governed:

• No monitoring was in place
• No owner was accountable
• Credentials were never rotated

The fallout: regulatory fines, reputational damage, and millions in losses.

This isn’t hypothetical. According to industry reports, 83% of enterprises suffered at least one machine identity compromise in the last year.

Best Practices To Secure Machine Identities

To stop these failures, organizations need an identity governance model purpose-built for machines. That means moving beyond retrofits and adopting:

1. Automated discovery & classification – Find every machine identity across SaaS, cloud, and hybrid environments.
2. Ownership assignment – Tie every NHI to a human or application team for accountability.
3. Lifecycle management – Govern provisioning, changes, and decommissioning through policy-driven automation.
4. Least privilege enforcement – Grant only the permissions required, avoiding privilege creep.
5. Regular access reviews – Continuously certify and adjust machine access rights.
6. Credential hygiene – Automate rotation, enforce expiry, and eliminate hardcoded or static credentials.

How SailPoint Machine Identity Security Solves It

SailPoint Machine Identity Security (MIS) delivers these capabilities natively, unifying machine identity governance with the broader identity fabric:

• Centralized visibility across all service accounts, APIs, bots, and RPAs.
• Automated discovery to surface unmanaged machine identities.
• Ownership and accountability mapping for audit readiness.
• Lifecycle governance that ensures no identity lingers unmonitored.
• Policy-driven certification workflows that reduce manual overhead.

Powered by the SailPoint Identity Security Cloud and built on the Atlas platform, MIS makes machine identity governance a seamless extension of enterprise identity security, not an afterthought.

Bottom Line

Machine identities are not just another type of account. They are the fastest growing and most ungoverned attack surface in enterprise IT. Treating them with human IAM playbooks is no longer enough.

Organizations that adopt machine-first identity governance, with automated discovery, lifecycle controls, least privilege, and unified oversight, can both reduce risk and accelerate automation safely.

SailPoint MIS was designed for this reality. It turns machine identity sprawl into a governed, accountable, and secure foundation — so enterprises can innovate with confidence.