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25/06/2026 10:29 pm
TL;DR: Non-human identities are now common enough that the security challenge is no longer about recognising them, but about changing the operating model that governs them, according to Orchid Security. The practical shift is from human-centric IAM habits to lifecycle, privilege, and monitoring controls that assume machine identities behave differently.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Orchid Security: Why non-human identities require a change in mindset
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern non-human identities differently from human accounts?
A: Security teams should govern non-human identities through ownership, lifecycle, and privilege scope, not through human login patterns.
Q: Why do non-human identities create more hidden access risk than user accounts?
A: Non-human identities often persist inside code, automation, and third-party integrations, which makes them harder to see and harder to remove.
Q: What breaks when organisations manage NHIs with human IAM processes?
A: Human IAM processes assume a person can be prompted, challenged, and recertified on a regular schedule.
Practitioner guidance
- Build a live NHI inventory Map every service account, API key, token, and certificate to an owner, purpose, and system dependency.
- Tie every credential to a rotation owner Assign rotation responsibility to a named team and record the renewal interval, downstream dependencies, and rollback steps.
- Reduce standing privilege at provisioning time Issue the minimum entitlements needed for the service, then review whether those rights still match the workload after each deployment or platform change.
What's in the full article
Orchid Security's full article covers the practical implications this post intentionally leaves at the concept level:
- How the vendor frames the mindset shift from user-centric IAM to machine identity governance
- The specific NHI use cases the article associates with lifecycle control, visibility, and privilege management
- The operational perspective behind why NHIs need different ownership and review assumptions
- The source article's own context for why this issue is surfacing now in enterprise environments
👉 Read Orchid Security's article on why non-human identities require a different mindset →
Non-human identities: what IAM teams need to rethink now?
Explore further
25/06/2026 11:02 pm
Human-centric identity governance is the wrong baseline for NHIs. Service accounts, API keys, certificates, and workload tokens do not behave like people, so the programme assumptions built around login, session, and user review do not map cleanly. That is why NHI governance has to start with identity inventory, ownership, and lifecycle control rather than with the human IAM playbook. Practitioners should treat NHIs as a separate governance class, not a minor variation of user access.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 88.5% of organisations acknowledge that their non-human IAM practices lag behind or are merely on par with their human identity and access management efforts, according to The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report.
- Only 23.7% of security professionals share secrets through insecure methods such as email or messaging applications, which still leaves a material exposure problem in everyday operations.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can organisations tell whether NHI governance is actually working?
A: A working programme can inventory its machine identities, identify their owners, show when credentials were last rotated, and explain why each identity still needs access. If those answers are incomplete, governance is mostly theoretical. Mature control is visible in evidence, not in policy statements.
👉 Read our full editorial: Why non-human identities require a different security mindset
