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30/07/2026 10:50 pm
TL;DR: Enterprise credential security is moving beyond basic vaulting toward unified control of privileged accounts, service accounts, API keys, and certificates across hybrid environments, according to Securden. That shift matters because fragmented tools leave high-value credentials exposed longer than modern IAM, PAM, and NHI programmes can tolerate.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Securden: enterprise credential security platforms for privileged, shared, and non-human identities
By the numbers:
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.
- NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern shared privileged credentials?
A: They should stop treating shared passwords as a collaboration convenience and manage them as high-risk assets.
Q: What problem does ownership attribution solve for service accounts and API keys?
A: It closes the gap between exposure detection and accountable remediation.
Q: What breaks when secrets are still stored outside managed vaults?
A: Secrets become easy to reuse across humans, scripts, and agents without a consistent audit trail.
Practitioner guidance
- Define one credential governance model across account types Classify privileged accounts, shared accounts, service accounts, API keys, and certificates under a single policy set so ownership, rotation, and revocation rules are consistent across the estate.
- Prioritise JIT for standing privileged access Use just-in-time access and session brokering for administrator and vendor pathways that currently rely on persistent entitlements.
- Automate rotation for machine credentials first Target service accounts, API keys, and certificates that are still rotated manually or not at all, because those credentials create the longest exposure windows.
What's in the full article
Securden's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Side-by-side feature breakdowns of PAM, EPM, CIEM, vendor access, and identity governance capabilities.
- Implementation-oriented comparisons of deployment speed, administrative overhead, and total cost of ownership across platform categories.
- Workflow detail on password rotation, session brokering, and credential vaulting for privileged accounts and shared credentials.
- Product-specific guidance on how the platform positions human and non-human identity coverage in enterprise environments.
👉 Read Securden's analysis of enterprise credential security platforms →
Unified PAM and EPM platforms: what identity teams should assess?
Explore further
30/07/2026 10:53 pm
Unified credential governance is becoming the operating model for modern identity security. The article reflects a market reality that PAM, EPM, and NHI controls now overlap operationally because the same enterprise systems are reached through human, service, and vendor identities. The old split between password vaulting and privileged access is too narrow for hybrid estates. Practitioners should treat credential governance as a single discipline spanning every identity type that can authenticate into production.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs , Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs.
- 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, increasing the risk of compromise over time.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when a vendor compromise creates internal access risk?
A: Accountability sits with both the business owner of the integration and the identity team that approved the trust path. Procurement may own the contract, but IAM owns the access relationship. If the downstream system still trusts the supplier after compromise, the governance gap is in access design as much as in vendor oversight.
👉 Read our full editorial: Enterprise credential security is shifting toward unified identity control
