Use IGA for people and add an NHI-specific control plane for service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates. The two layers solve different problems. IGA handles human lifecycle workflows, while NHI governance handles discovery, ownership, rotation, expiry, and decommissioning for machine identities.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Governance fails when organisations treat machine identities as a side issue inside the human identity programme. IGA is built for joiner, mover, leaver workflows, attestations, and role assignment for people. NHIs need something different: discovery, ownership, lifecycle control, rotation, and decommissioning for service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates. That distinction matters because NHIs often outnumber people by 25x to 50x, and Top 10 NHI Issues shows how quickly excess privilege and weak ownership expand attack paths. NIST CSF 2.0 reinforces the need for clear governance and risk ownership across identity and access functions, not just periodic reviews.
For security teams, the real risk is not only access sprawl but also hidden machine credentials embedded in code, CI/CD systems, and third-party integrations. When those identities are unmanaged, no amount of human IGA clean-up will reduce the exposure. In practice, many security teams encounter NHI abuse only after a secret has already been used in production or exfiltrated from a pipeline, rather than through intentional governance.
How It Works in Practice
Organisations should run two linked control planes. The first is IGA for humans, where HR-driven lifecycle events, RBAC, and access certification govern who should have access. The second is an NHI governance layer that continuously discovers machine identities, assigns owners, classifies risk, and enforces rotation and expiry. NHI Mgmt Group research in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs highlights a practical problem: 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, which makes short-lived controls especially important.
A workable operating model usually includes:
- inventorying NHIs across apps, cloud platforms, pipelines, and partner connections;
- binding each NHI to a named business and technical owner;
- setting TTLs for secrets, certificates, and tokens so credentials expire by design;
- using PAM or vault controls for issuance, rotation, and revocation;
- reviewing entitlement drift and removing unused identities on a scheduled basis.
For control design, NIST CSF 2.0 helps teams anchor identity governance to risk management, while NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 supports a structured approach to Protect and Identify functions. For implementation detail, many organisations are also aligning workload authentication to external identity primitives such as OIDC or SPIFFE-style workload identity, because static secrets are harder to govern than cryptographic proof of what a workload is. These controls tend to break down when NHIs are created inside ephemeral CI/CD jobs without ownership metadata because discovery and revocation become incomplete.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter NHI control often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance stronger governance against release speed and integration complexity. That tradeoff is real in DevOps, SaaS-to-SaaS integrations, and legacy systems that cannot support modern workload identity or short-lived credentials. Current guidance suggests treating those exceptions as temporary, not as a permanent reason to keep static secrets.
One common edge case is third-party and partner access. The direct owner may sit outside the security team, but the organisation still needs a control point for approval, expiry, and revocation. Another is service accounts that cannot yet be rotated automatically. In those cases, compensate with narrower scope, logging, and documented review cadence. Audit-focused teams should also connect controls to Regulatory and Audit Perspectives, because evidence of ownership and expiry is often what auditors ask for first. Where secrets are exposed in repositories or tooling, incidents like JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure show that detection and revocation speed matter as much as policy design.
For governance maturity, the best practice is evolving toward coordinated IGA, NHI governance, and Zero Trust aligned with NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, but there is no universal standard for every environment yet.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 | Addresses discovery and ownership of machine identities. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Least-privilege access control is central to NHI governance. |
| NIST AI RMF | Supports governance for autonomous systems that use machine identities. |
Establish accountability, monitoring, and risk decisions for any autonomous workload using NHIs.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 6, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
