Why Non-Human Identity Provisioning Is Broken and How to Fix It in the Age of AI and Automation

Read full article here: https://www.oasis.security/blog/what-is-non-human-identity-provisioning-and-why-is-it-broken/?source=nhimg

Non-Human Identity provisioning is the process of creating and managing identities for service accounts, APIs, automation pipelines, and AI agents, and it's fundamentally broken in most organizations.

Provisioning is often manual, ticket-driven, or entirely ad hoc, handled by developers and automation tools without centralized oversight. This fragmented approach results in serious security risks: orphaned accounts, over-permissioned identities, unrotated credentials, and missing ownership. As environments scale—especially with the rise of AI and autonomous workloads—these risks are amplified exponentially.

What’s worse is that provisioning is still treated as a one-time task instead of a foundational security control. This outdated mindset ignores the full identity lifecycle and misses opportunities to embed policy, governance, and continuous monitoring from the start.

In cloud-native and hybrid environments, the explosion of NHIs—from Kubernetes workloads to MCP-connected AI agents—demands scalable, policy-driven automation. Without it, organizations face a perfect storm of identity sprawl, privilege abuse, and secrets mismanagement.

Why Manual Provisioning Fails

Manual NHI provisioning might work in small, static environments—but it simply doesn’t scale in today’s cloud-native, multi-cloud, and AI-driven ecosystems. These outdated workflows are:

• Slow - Delaying developer productivity or leading them to bypass controls

• Inconsistent - Applying policies unevenly across teams and tools

• Error-prone - Introducing security gaps through human mistakes and unclear ownership

• Unscalable - Adding operational overhead with every new service or cloud provider

Even semi-automated approaches—like Terraform scripts or tagging policies—fall short when they lack enforcement, oversight, and lifecycle governance.

The Hidden Risk

As teams seek speed, they often create identities and credentials through untracked automation—introducing serious risks:

• Unmonitored NHIs with no ownership or audit trail

• Over-permissioned scripts that increase the attack surface

• Abandoned identities that remain active long after they’re needed

• Credential sprawl with no rotation or vaulting practices

These silent threats often remain undetected until it’s too late.

Final Thought 

This article unpacks why traditional NHI provisioning fails, what risks it introduces, and how security and IAM leaders must rethink provisioning as a governed, automated, and lifecycle-driven process to support modern environments.