Unifying Human and Non-Human Identity Security in 2025

Read full article here: https://www.andromedasecurity.com/blogs/ciso-alert-human-identity-nhi-must-be-addressed-together/?source=nhimg

Identity-centric security was reinforced as a top enterprise priority for 2025 and for good reason. Both human identities and Non-Human Identities (NHIs) are fueling today’s most damaging breaches. While NHIs have gained recent attention, human identity security remains unresolved, and CISOs can no longer afford to treat them in isolation.

The Converging Identity Threat Landscape

• Identity sprawl across cloud and SaaS has eroded traditional security boundaries.

• Over-permissioning plagues both humans and NHIs, 95% of cloud identities are overprivileged.

• Every human user now owns 10–50 NHIs on average, magnifying risk.

• Breaches like the AWS ransomware attack and Snowflake incident illustrate that both human and machine identity compromises can lead to massive exposure.

Why a Unified Strategy Matters

Human risk and NHI risk are interlinked:

• An NHI’s lifecycle should be tied to a human owner for accountability, key rotation, permissions management, and compliance.

• Orphaned NHIs without owners often accumulate excessive privileges, making them high-value targets.

• When a human identity is offboarded, all linked NHIs must be deleted, rekeyed, or reassigned.

Zero Trust Requires Joint Governance

• Least privilege must be applied across both identity types, rightsizing permissions continuously.

• Lifecycle management should cover creation, assignment, rotation, and retirement of all identities.

• The objective is to reduce blast radius so that a single compromised identity, human or NHI, does not equal a breach.

Key CISO Actions for 2025

1. Integrate Human & NHI Management – Treat them as a single governance domain.

2. Automate Lifecycle Controls – Ensure every NHI is owned, tracked, and adjusted when human roles change.

3. Enhance Visibility & Analytics – Monitor permissions and detect excessive privilege in real time.

4. Adopt Zero Trust as a Baseline – Plan for compromise and design controls to limit exposure.

Bottom Line

The future of identity security is holistic. NHIs may be the hot topic, but human identity risk remains equally urgent. The organizations that will thrive in the Zero Trust era are those that break down silos and manage human and non-human identities together from day one.