Topic starter
22/01/2026 5:32 pm
TL;DR: Non-human identities are often unmanaged, persistent, and over-privileged across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, leaving secrets exposed in code, pipelines, and shared accounts, according to Keeper Security. Traditional IAM tools were built for people, so the control model breaks when machine identities need lifecycle ownership, rotation, and time-bound access.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Keeper Security: “How To Protect Non-Human Identities (NHIs)”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when non-human identities are governed like human users?
A: Lifecycle triggers, ownership, and review processes stop working because machine identities do not generate joiner, mover, or leaver events.
Q: Why do long-lived service account keys create more risk than they solve?
A: Long-lived service account keys create standing access that survives beyond the workload, so one leak can enable repeated use, lateral movement, or delayed abuse.
Q: How can organisations tell whether NHI governance is actually working?
A: NHI governance is working when every machine identity has an owner, a purpose, a minimum-necessary entitlement, and evidence of rotation and review.
Practitioner guidance
- Centralise machine secret governance Move service accounts, API keys and workload credentials into a single governed secrets workflow so issuance, retrieval, rotation and revocation are visible together.
- Eliminate standing privilege for NHIs Replace permanent machine access with task-scoped entitlements, and remove inherited permissions that are not required for the workload to function.
- Rotate static credentials on a defined schedule Prioritise long-lived passwords, tokens and SSH keys that have no expiry and no automated revocation path, then shorten their lifetime until reuse becomes difficult.
Bottom line: Non-human identities become a governance problem when human-centric IAM leaves machine credentials unmanaged, persistent and over-privileged.
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This topic was modified 2 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group
11/10/2026 1:39 am
Machine identity governance fails when organisations treat NHIs as implementation details rather than governed identities. The article describes a common pattern: service accounts, workload credentials and API secrets exist everywhere, but ownership, lifecycle and policy enforcement are fragmented across teams. That fragmentation is not an administrative nuisance. It is the control gap that lets machine access persist after the business need has moved on. Practitioners should read this as a governance problem, not a tooling problem.
A few things that frame the scale:
- NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 1 in every 1,000 non-human identities in enterprise environments is more than 10 years old.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should security teams do when machine credentials are discovered in code or logs?
A: Revoke the exposed credential, trace its downstream privileges, and replace it with a governed identity that has documented ownership and rotation. The goal is to remove both the credential and the unmanaged access path it represents before it becomes persistent.
👉 Read our full editorial: Why existing IAM controls fall short for non-human identities