NHI remediation in cloud environments: what should teams fix first?

TL;DR: Cloud sprawl, third-party integrations, and hardcoded credentials make non-human identity remediation harder to prioritise because visibility, ownership, and privilege context are often incomplete, according to Entro Security. The real issue is that cloud programmes still treat NHIs like stable assets, even when their permissions, usage patterns, and blast radius change continuously.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Entro Security: Prioritization of Non-Human Identity Remediation in Cloud Environments

By the numbers:

• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
• 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should security teams prioritise NHI remediation in cloud environments?

A: Start with identities that combine excessive privilege, weak ownership, and sensitive system access.

Q: Why do NHIs make cloud access harder to govern than human accounts?

A: NHIs are harder to govern because they multiply rapidly, operate across systems, and often lack clear ownership or lifecycle discipline.

Q: What breaks when hardcoded secrets are used in cloud environments?

A: Hardcoded secrets break the normal lifecycle of credentials because they move outside vaulting, rotation, and revocation controls.

Practitioner guidance

• Build continuous NHI discovery across cloud and code layers Enumerate machine identities through cloud provider APIs, then extend coverage to repositories, configuration files, and CI/CD systems so hardcoded secrets are not missed.
• Attach ownership and usage context to every identity Record the human owner, service dependency, permission scope, last use, and data sensitivity for each identity so remediation can be routed to the right responder.
• Prioritise the highest-blast-radius identities first Score identities by excess privilege, third-party exposure, irregular use, and access to sensitive data, then remediate the highest-risk group before broad clean-up efforts.

What's in the full article

Entro Security's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• A step-by-step discovery workflow for enumerating NHIs across AWS, Azure, GCP, repositories, and configuration files.
• Practical guidance on adding ownership, usage, and sensitivity metadata so remediation queues can be prioritised with context.
• Examples of posture controls for JIT access, ephemeral credentials, and automated rotation in cloud environments.
• Operational response patterns for continuous monitoring, anomaly detection, and automated revocation workflows.

👉 Read Entro Security's blog on prioritising NHI remediation in cloud environments →

NHI remediation in cloud environments: what should teams fix first?

Explore further

View Full Forum →  |  NHI Foundation Course →  |  Our Services →