Topic starter
11/12/2025 4:17 pm
TL;DR: Machine identities are increasingly created outside human-style onboarding, often hidden in code, cloned across environments, and managed with shared secrets or static credentials, according to Delinea. That makes inventory, rotation, least privilege, and lifecycle governance the deciding controls, not MFA-centric user IAM patterns.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Delinea: “Cybersecurity Awareness Month PSA: Machines are identities too”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when organisations manage machine identities like user accounts?
A: The programme loses visibility, ownership, and lifecycle control.
Q: Why do shared API keys and tokens create such a large risk for machine identities?
A: Shared machine credentials expand risk because they are reusable, hard to attribute, and often copied into code or multiple environments.
Q: How do security teams know whether machine identity governance is working?
A: They know it is working when every non-human credential has a named owner, a visible system scope, and a documented retirement path.
Practitioner guidance
- Establish authoritative machine identity inventory Continuously discover service accounts, API keys, tokens, certificates, and workload identities across cloud and on-premises environments, then assign an accountable owner and business service to each one.
- Remove shared secrets from production paths Replace static credentials with vaulted, short-lived credentials wherever systems support it, and track every location where the same secret has been duplicated.
- Enforce machine-specific offboarding Tie deprovisioning to application retirement, environment teardown, vendor exit, and pipeline changes so orphaned machine identities do not persist after the original use case ends.
Bottom line: Machine identities create a governance gap when organisations apply human IAM patterns to non-human subjects with different authentication and lifecycle behaviour.
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This topic was modified 10 months ago 2 times by Abdelrahman
This topic was modified 1 day ago by NHI Mgmt Group
11/10/2026 3:34 am
Human IAM assumptions do not survive machine identity reality: the article shows that non-human identities are not just another account type. They are created, authenticated, and retired through different mechanics, so MFA-centred user IAM leaves the core machine-identity risk untouched. The practitioner conclusion is that governance must start from the identity's operating model, not from the nearest human control.
A few things that frame the scale:
- NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: When should organisations prioritise workload identity controls over more user-focused IAM work?
A: Organisations should prioritise workload identity controls when service accounts, automation tokens, or API keys can reach sensitive systems without strong verification. If those credentials are widespread, long-lived, or hard to inventory, they are already a material attack path and should be treated as a governance priority.
👉 Read our full editorial: Machine identities need governance beyond human IAM controls