The Non-Human Identities Ownership Problem: Who Really Governs Your Enterprise NHIs?

Read full article here: https://blog.gitguardian.com/defining-nhi-ownership/?utm_source=nhimg

In today’s enterprise IT landscape, non-human identities (NHIs), service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates—outnumber humans by orders of magnitude. Yet, when security teams ask, “Who owns this workload or secret?”, the answer is often silence or finger-pointing. The problem isn’t negligence, it’s that traditional concepts of ownership simply don’t translate to NHIs.

Ownership: From Blame to Context

In personal life, ownership means control and accountability. But in enterprise IT, especially with NHIs, ownership is distributed across multiple teams, developers create them, DevOps deploy them, and security tries to govern them. No single person can realistically be “on the hook.” Instead, ownership should shift from blame assignment to context provision.

The real “owner” is the subject matter expert who can answer key questions:

• Why does this NHI exist?
• What access does it have?
• Where are its secrets stored, and have they leaked?
• When should it be rotated or revoked?

Developers in the Hot Seat But Not Alone

Often, developers hold the most context about an NHI, but they’re not responsible for its lifecycle governance. Complicating matters further, developers leave organizations, taking that context with them. This creates gaps that attackers exploit—long-lived, orphaned, and over-permissioned NHIs.

A Risk-First Approach to NHI Governance

The OWASP Top 10 for NHIs provides a practical roadmap for managing these risks, with a focus on questions that matter most: is the secret active, is it secure, what is its purpose, and how much risk does it introduce? The goal isn’t to assign permanent ownership to one person but to make sure the answers are available at all times—scalable, persistent, and not reliant on individual memory.

GitGuardian’s Context-Driven Solution

GitGuardian helps enterprises reframe ownership around assurance and governance, not accountability theater. With its NHI Governance platform,

GitGuardian connects:

• Secrets detection → governance workflows
• Vault observability → IAM context
• AWS IAM and cloud integrations → blast radius analysis

This creates a closed loop of visibility, context, and remediation, ensuring questions about NHIs can be answered instantly—who created it, what it can access, whether its secrets are valid, and what risks it poses.

From Ownership to Assurance

The conversation about NHI ownership is evolving. Instead of chasing an “owner to blame,” modern enterprises need structured, tool-driven governance that scales across thousands of identities. With GitGuardian, ownership becomes actionable context that empowers teams to respond faster, reduce risk, and align with frameworks like the OWASP NHI Top 10.

Key takeaway

In NHI governance, ownership isn’t about who’s at fault—it’s about who has the context. Real security comes from visibility, automation, and risk management at scale.