Topic starter
02/08/2026 12:05 pm
TL;DR: Identity has become the primary security perimeter, and Torq’s guide argues that IAM maturity now depends on extending governance from humans to service accounts, API keys, and cloud credentials, with 88.5% of organisations saying non-human IAM lags human IAM in Aembit’s 2024 report. The structural problem is that access review cycles, standing privilege assumptions, and fragmented tooling were built for slower human-paced identities, not high-volume machine identities.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by torq: “Identity and Access Management Best Practices”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when non-human identities are not governed like human accounts?
A: Service accounts, API keys, tokens, and AI agents can retain access long after the original task ends because they do not naturally pass through joiner-mover-leaver processes.
Q: Why do overprivileged service accounts create such persistent cloud risk?
A: Overprivileged service accounts create persistent risk because they combine standing access, weak ownership, and broad lateral movement potential.
Q: How do organisations know whether non-human identity governance is working?
A: Look for three signals: fewer standing credentials, faster revocation of secrets and tokens, and evidence that access decisions match the actual runtime behaviour of the identity.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory every non-human identity Build a complete inventory of service accounts, API keys, cloud credentials, and automation tokens across cloud, SaaS, and pipelines.
- Replace standing machine access with scoped issuance Where a workflow does not require persistent privilege, use short-lived credentials, scoped tokens, or workflow-bound access instead of durable secrets.
- Automate non-human access reviews Extend certification workflows to machine identities so access is reviewed on schedule and exceptions are logged with an approver and reason.
Bottom line: Non-human identities are now a maturity test for IAM because they often carry broad, persistent access that was never designed to be reviewed like human access.
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02/08/2026 1:10 pm
Non-human identity governance is now a core IAM maturity test: A programme that still treats service accounts, API keys, and cloud credentials as secondary objects is not mature IAM. The operating assumption has changed from "identity means a person" to "identity means any account that can act in production." That means discovery, ownership, and lifecycle control over non-human identities are now baseline governance requirements, not advanced extras. Practitioners should measure maturity by how completely machine identities are inventoried and reviewed.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- More than 95% of infrastructure-as-a-service accounts use less than 3% of the entitlements they are granted, according to Gartner.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should teams respond when machine identities are discovered without ownership?
A: Treat undocumented machine identities as active risk, not housekeeping debt. Assign ownership, validate business need, restrict permissions to the minimum viable scope, and remove any identity that cannot be justified or reviewed. Unowned access is usually the place where governance has already failed.
👉 Read our full editorial: IAM maturity now depends on governing non-human identities