Achieving 360° Security: How Non-Human Identity Strengthens Privileged Access Management

Read full article here: https://www.oasis.security/blog/non-human-identity-complement-privileged-access-management/?utm_source=nhimg

As organizations continue to modernize their infrastructure and expand into multi-cloud environments, one question often arises among CISOs, IAM leaders, and security architects:

“If our Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution already protects admin accounts, why can’t it manage service accounts and other non-human identities as well?”

It’s a fair question—but one rooted in a misunderstanding of what PAM was designed to do and how today’s identity landscape has evolved.

The short answer: PAM protects privileged human access. Non-Human Identities (NHIs) represent a completely different challenge—one of scale, visibility, and automation—that requires a complementary layer of security and governance.

The Role of PAM in the Modern Identity Stack

Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions, such as CyberArk, BeyondTrust, and Delinea, are built to secure, control, and monitor activities of human privileged users — system administrators, root users, and other personnel with elevated access.

PAM works by integrating with authoritative sources like Active Directory (AD) or HR systems, mapping privileges to individual users, and enforcing policies such as:

• Credential vaulting and rotation
• Just-in-time access for admins
• Session recording and audit trails
• Multi-factor authentication for privileged accounts

This makes PAM an essential control for preventing insider threats and unauthorized access by human users. It provides oversight, accountability, and traceability over who accessed what — and when.

However, PAM’s entire architecture was built on the assumption that identities are human-centric — relatively few in number, persistent, and tied to individuals who can authenticate, request access, and be held accountable.

Why PAM Alone Cannot Secure Non-Human Identities

Modern digital ecosystems look very different from the environments PAM was designed for.

With cloud computing, DevOps automation, and microservices, the number of non-human identities — including service accounts, machine credentials, tokens, and API keys — now outnumbers human identities by 10 to 50 times.

These NHIs perform critical functions like connecting applications, deploying infrastructure, and executing workflows—but they often have privileged access and no interactive authentication.

Key Challenges PAM Faces with NHIs:

1. No Central Source of Truth
   Unlike human users, NHIs are rarely tied to HR or AD. They are often created on the fly by developers within cloud consoles, CI/CD pipelines, or Kubernetes clusters. This decentralized creation breaks the data model PAM relies on.
2. Lack of Contextual Awareness
   PAM cannot natively identify relationships between NHIs, applications, and resources. Without context (e.g., who owns this service account, what system it touches), governance and lifecycle management become nearly impossible.
3. Ephemeral and Dynamic Lifecycles
   Many NHIs are short-lived or auto-generated, existing for minutes or hours. PAM, designed for long-lived accounts, cannot efficiently manage this rapid churn.
4. Multi-Consumer Complexity
   A single NHI may serve multiple systems or teams. This shared ownership defies PAM’s one-to-one user-account model.
5. Cloud and Format Diversity
   AWS IAM roles, Azure service principals, and GCP service accounts all have unique structures. Traditional PAM tools, built for on-prem servers, struggle to normalize these modern identity types.
6. Blind Spots in Ownership and Accountability
   Many NHIs lack documented owners or use cases. PAM cannot remediate or enforce controls without this metadata, leaving these identities as unmanaged “ghost accounts” in production environments.

The result? NHIs become the largest unmanaged attack surface inside the enterprise. They hold keys, tokens, and permissions powerful enough to move laterally, escalate privileges, or exfiltrate data—without triggering PAM controls or human oversight.

Complementing PAM with Non-Human Identity Management

To achieve 360° security, organizations must extend identity governance beyond humans and into the machine layer. This is where Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) platforms like Oasis ,come in.

NHIM platforms are purpose-built to bring visibility, automation, and governance to the sprawling world of machine identities.

How NHIM Complements PAM:

1. Comprehensive Discovery and Visibility
   Oasis continuously scans clouds, SaaS platforms, secret managers, and code repositories to uncover all existing NHIs—complete with metadata such as owners, permissions, usage frequency, and dependencies.
2. Context Correlation and Risk Prioritization
   Using advanced analytics, Oasis automatically maps relationships between NHIs, applications, and resources. Its Context Correlation Engine ranks risks by severity, ownership, and exposure, enabling security teams to focus on what matters most.
3. Automated Lifecycle Management
   With built-in automation, Oasis can rotate secrets, decommission stale accounts, and handle offboarding workflows—without disrupting production workloads.
4. Policy-Driven Governance
   Oasis enforces least privilege, ensures separation of duties, and integrates with IAM and PAM policies for consistent access control across human and machine identities.

By combining PAM’s strength in human access governance with NHIM’s capabilities for machine identity control, organizations can achieve a truly unified, 360° approach to identity security.

The Future: Unified Identity Security Fabric

The convergence of PAM, IGA, and NHIM forms the next-generation Identity Security Fabric—one that governs every identity, human and non-human, across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments.

In this model:

• PAM continues to protect and audit human privileged access.
• NHIM secures the invisible layer of machine identities, secrets, and tokens.
• Together, they provide complete visibility, governance, and resilience across the enterprise identity perimeter.

As machine-to-machine communication continues to dominate enterprise operations, organizations that integrate NHIM with PAM will not only reduce risk but also future-proof their identity strategy against the evolving threat landscape.

Final Thoughts

Privileged Access Management remains indispensable—but it was never meant to manage the sheer scale and complexity of machine identities.

By complementing PAM with a dedicated Non-Human Identity Management platform like Oasis, enterprises can extend governance, automate controls, and close the visibility gap across their entire identity fabric.

Because in today’s world, identity is the new perimeter—and machines now hold the keys.