Topic starter
03/06/2026 7:26 pm
TL;DR: Non-human identities now account for a growing share of enterprise access, and 54% of executives say inappropriate NHI access rights have already caused security issues, according to Entro Security. The real problem is that human IAM assumptions do not hold for API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens, and machine identities that operate outside human-paced review cycles.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Entro Security: “Difference between non-human and human identities, and the challenges they pose”.
By the numbers:
- 54% of executives have reported that inappropriate access rights granted to non-human identities have led to security issues.
Key questions
Q: How should teams govern non-human identities in AI-heavy environments?
A: Teams should govern non-human identities the same way they govern other privileged assets: assign ownership, minimise scope, rotate credentials regularly, and monitor for abnormal use.
Q: What problem does ownership attribution solve for service accounts and API keys?
A: It closes the gap between exposure detection and accountable remediation.
Q: What are the signs that NHI governance is failing in an enterprise?
A: Common warning signs include unclear ownership for service accounts, secrets stored in code or configuration instead of managed vaults, infrequent rotation, and weak offboarding of API keys.
Practitioner guidance
- Map every non-human identity Create and maintain an authoritative inventory of API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens and machine identities, including owners, purpose and current access scope.
- Separate NHI and human governance workflows Do not reuse employee access review, password policy or MFA workflows as the primary control model for machine identities and secrets.
- Tighten secret scope and rotation Reduce token and key permissions to the minimum required for the workload and review rotation, revocation and reuse on a defined schedule.
Bottom line: Non-human identities need a different control model because they do not behave like employee accounts and cannot be governed reliably with user-centric IAM assumptions.
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03/06/2026 7:29 pm
NHI governance is a separate control discipline, not a subset of human IAM. Human-centric controls assume a person, a login and a review cycle. NHIs break that assumption because they are often created for applications, distributed through automation and left active across multiple systems. The implication is that identity programmes need distinct ownership, visibility and lifecycle rules for machine access.
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.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do organisations reduce the risk from standing NHI access?
A: Organisations reduce risk by limiting access scope, centralising secret governance, and establishing clear lifecycle ownership for every machine identity. Standing access becomes dangerous when it is invisible and persistent. The goal is to make NHI credentials easy to find, hard to overuse and simple to revoke when the workload changes.
👉 Read our full editorial: Human and non-human identities need different control models