Notifications
Clear all
Topic starter
25/06/2026 2:46 pm
TL;DR: Enterprises are now managing AI agents, bots, service accounts, and cloud services alongside human users, and SafePaaS argues that legacy identity tooling cannot keep up with the resulting scale, lifecycle churn, and audit pressure. The core problem is not more integration, but governance that can follow every identity type across fast-moving workflows.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SafePaaS: enterprise identity governance for human and non-human actors
By the numbers:
- 70% of organisations grant AI systems more access than they would give a human employee performing the exact same job.
- Only 13% of organisations feel extremely prepared for the reality of agentic AI despite the majority racing toward autonomous adoption.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern non-human identities in fast-changing environments?
A: Security teams should govern non-human identities as a distinct identity class with named ownership, lifecycle controls, and entitlement review rules.
Q: Why do service accounts and bots create more governance risk than people in many programmes?
A: Service accounts and bots often outnumber people, change faster, and are easier to forget after a project ends.
Q: What do organisations get wrong about access reviews for machine identities?
A: They often apply human review logic to machine access, which misses the speed and persistence of non-human entitlements.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory every non-human identity continuously Create a living register of service accounts, bots, API credentials, embedded application identities, and AI agents across SaaS, cloud, and on-prem environments.
- Classify access by actor type and business function Separate human, NHI, and AI agent entitlements in your governance model so reviews can distinguish direct user access from connector, script, or workload privileges.
- Automate offboarding for dormant integrations Build revocation into application retirement, vendor change, and project closure workflows so credentials and accounts do not survive the use case.
What's in the full article
SafePaaS's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Specific connector and deployment patterns for onboarding human and non-human identities into complex enterprise environments
- Workflow detail for access requests, role changes, and offboarding across hybrid systems
- Examples of continuous certification and exception handling for high-risk access cases
- Platform-level dashboards and analytics for outliers, conflicts, and policy breaches
👉 Read SafePaaS's analysis of enterprise identity governance for human and non-human actors →
Non-human identity sprawl is exposing the governance gap teams miss?
Explore further
25/06/2026 3:55 pm
Legacy identity governance is being outpaced by non-human scale. The article describes an environment where human users are only one part of the identity estate, and that is the right way to frame the problem. When bots, service accounts, embedded apps, and AI agents multiply faster than manual governance can absorb them, the control model stops being administratively inefficient and becomes structurally incomplete. The practical conclusion is that identity security must be designed around actor diversity, not around users as the default unit of control.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- That visibility gap helps explain why only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in their ability to secure NHIs, according to the same research.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do teams know whether their identity governance is keeping up with automation?
A: A good signal is whether new integrations can be onboarded, changed, and retired without manual workarounds or spreadsheet reconciliation. If ownership, entitlement scope, and de-provisioning still depend on ad hoc human follow-up, governance is lagging the environment. Continuous visibility and lifecycle automation should reduce that dependency.
👉 Read our full editorial: Enterprise identity governance is breaking under non-human sprawl
