Topic starter
10/07/2026 9:14 pm
TL;DR: IAM trends for 2026 centre on non-human identity sprawl, AI-assisted detection, and simpler architectures, with Soffid citing 80 NHIs per human identity, 99% excessive privilege, and credential compromise in under 1 minute. The governance shift is from fragmented controls to continuous discovery, lifecycle enforcement, and measurable identity resilience.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Soffid: “IAM Trends 2026: what CISOs need to prepare for”.
By the numbers:
- 80 non-human identities for every human identity
- 99% of accounts with excessive privileges
- 66% of credentials compromised in less than 1 minute
Key questions
Q: What breaks when organisations treat non-human identities like static assets?
A: Lifecycle drift breaks first.
Q: Why do excessive privileges create such a large identity security risk?
A: Because any identity with more access than it needs has a larger blast radius when credentials are stolen or sessions are abused.
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
- Establish a live NHI inventory Track every service account, API-connected identity, workload credential, and automation account with an owner, business purpose, and expiry condition.
- Enforce immediate offboarding for orphaned identities Remove or disable machine identities as soon as the service, application, or pipeline they support is retired or replaced.
- Reduce standing privilege before it becomes an entry path Review non-human and human entitlements together, then remove privileges that are not needed for the current task or operating state.
Bottom line: Identity is no longer a background administration issue. It is the first place attackers look, and the estate now includes both human and non-human access paths.
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10/07/2026 9:37 pm
Identity is now the control plane attackers aim at first. When identities become the primary entry point, the old assumption that perimeter controls absorb most initial risk no longer holds. The governance problem shifts to whether identity inventory, privilege scope, and revocation are fast enough to matter. Practitioners should treat identity control as the first line of containment, not a downstream administration function.
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: Should organisations prioritise continuous discovery or periodic recertification for identities?
A: Continuous discovery should come first for identities that appear, disappear, or change rapidly, especially in cloud and automation-heavy environments. Recertification still matters, but it cannot compensate for blind spots between review cycles. When identities are dynamic, governance has to start with detection and ownership before certification can mean anything.
👉 Read our full editorial: IAM trends for 2026 show identity is now the attack entry point