The Challenges and Failures in Modern Identity Management

Read full article here: https://www.oasis.security/blog/whats-broken-with-identity-management/?source=nhimg

What’s Broken with Identity Management?

Identity has always been the foundation of enterprise security. It defines who (or what) can access what within digital ecosystems. For decades, identity programs focused almost exclusively on humans, employees, partners, and contractors. But that model no longer reflects reality.

Today, non-human identities (NHIs), service accounts, IAM roles, API keys, secrets, tokens, certificates, and workloads, outnumber human identities by 10x–50x in modern enterprises. This explosion is driven by hybrid multi-cloud adoption, microservices, DevOps automation, and AI-powered workflows. And it has fundamentally broken traditional identity management approaches.

The Rising Risks of Non-Human Identities

Unlike human accounts, NHIs:

• Cannot be tied to biometrics or MFA.
• Are often highly privileged (with 5x more privileged NHIs than human users).
• Sprawl unchecked across clouds, CI/CD pipelines, SaaS, and legacy systems.
• Frequently overlap in ways that create toxic combinations and hidden vulnerabilities.

Recent incidents highlight this danger:

• Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed 38TB of sensitive data through a mismanaged token
• Okta disclosed hackers stole customer access tokens from its support unit
• Slack employee tokens were compromised, leading to a GitHub breach
• CircleCI’s 2023 incident traced back to compromised NHI secrets

In each case, the breach didn’t hinge on a human being phished, it stemmed from unmanaged or overprivileged NHIs.

Why the Security Stack Falls Short

Most enterprise security tools weren’t built with NHIs in mind:

• IAM/PAM: Excellent at managing human identities and “break-glass” accounts, but poorly suited for the scale and dynamism of machine identities.
• Secret Managers: Useful for vaulting credentials, but not identity-aware—they can’t tell you who owns a secret, how it’s used, or whether it’s over-privileged.
• CSPMs: Cloud posture tools surface misconfigurations, but they take an infrastructure-first, not an identity-first approach. They flag risks but rarely remediate them.

The result? Security teams are left with fragmented tools, blind spots, and an ever-growing backlog of unremediated risks.

Why a New Model Is Needed

NHIs are deeply embedded in operational systems. Without full lifecycle visibility, from creation to rotation to decommissioning—organizations face:

• Operational risk: downtime when revoking or rotating NHI access.
• Security gaps: unmanaged credentials acting as permanent backdoors.
• Compliance failures: no provable controls over ownership, entitlements, and usage.

This is why traditional IAM is broken: it cannot keep pace with the volume, velocity, and volatility of NHIs.

Toward Comprehensive Non-Human Identity Management

To close this gap, purpose-built platforms are emerging that:

• Continuously discover all NHIs across hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems.
• Classify identities by risk based on privilege, exposure, and usage.
• Automate remediation of risky configurations, expired secrets, and toxic entitlements.
• Provide end-to-end lifecycle management for NHIs at scale.

This identity-first approach enables security and operations teams to secure NHIs proactively, rather than reactively chasing leaks and misconfigurations.

Bottom Line

Traditional identity management is broken because it was built for humans, not machines. As NHIs become the dominant identity type in modern infrastructure and the favorite target of attackers, enterprises must evolve to identity-first, NHI-aware platforms that deliver continuous visibility, contextual risk insights, and automated remediation. Anything less leaves the enterprise exposed.