Create a cross-functional group with representation from IAM, Security, DevOps, Infrastructure and Operations, and Cloud teams. Give it authority to define policy, approve tooling decisions, and resolve conflicts that cut across departments. The goal is not to centralise every operational task in one team, but to establish a single governance point that can align standards and keep machine identity management consistent across the enterprise.
Why a machine identity working group should exist
A machine identity management working group is most useful when the organisation already has multiple teams creating, using, and rotating certificates, service accounts, tokens, and other secrets without a shared operating model. The group exists to prevent policy drift, duplicate tooling, and conflicting approval paths, while keeping local execution close to the systems that own the identities.
The practical point is governance, not bureaucracy. A working group becomes the single place where standards are defined once, exceptions are reviewed consistently, and disputes over ownership are resolved before they turn into fragmented controls or inconsistent lifecycle handling.
For teams that need a broader reference point on the underlying subject, Ultimate Guide to NHIs and the key challenges and risks sections are useful for seeing how ownership, visibility, and lifecycle issues connect in practice.
What the working group needs authority over
The group should have clear decision rights over policy definitions, control standards, approved patterns, and exception handling. That matters because machine identity work often spans IAM, DevOps, infrastructure, cloud, and security, and each team will otherwise optimise for its own deployment speed or operational convenience.
Authority should be limited to governance decisions that require cross-functional agreement. Operational tasks can stay distributed, but the group should own the rules that determine how identities are issued, rotated, monitored, revoked, and reviewed. If it cannot approve tooling or settle conflicts, it will become a discussion forum rather than a governance body.
Useful supporting material includes Top 10 NHI Issues for common ownership and lifecycle failure patterns, and The Critical Gaps in Machine Identity Management report for the control gaps that tend to appear when governance is split across teams.
How to structure ownership without centralising every task
The best model is a federated one: the working group sets enterprise standards, while the system owners keep day-to-day operational responsibility for their own services. That keeps accountability close to the application or platform team, but prevents every team from inventing its own certificate process, secret storage pattern, or renewal workflow.
Each represented function should bring a distinct concern to the table. IAM can define identity lifecycle and access governance, Security can set risk thresholds and review rules, DevOps can align the process with delivery pipelines, Infrastructure and Operations can ensure reliability and renewal behaviour, and Cloud can handle provider-specific constraints. The group should expose those dependencies early so one team does not silently build around another team’s assumptions.
Where the operating model includes workload identity or service-to-service authentication, Guide to SPIFFE and SPIRE and the SPIFFE workload identity specification provide a useful reference for how consistent identity patterns support distributed ownership without losing control.
Risk and Threat Considerations
Fragmented ownership usually creates invisible gaps, not immediate failures. The main risk is that no single team sees the full lifecycle, so secrets linger, permissions drift, and renewal or offboarding steps are missed until an outage or incident exposes the weakness.
Failure mechanism: Conflicting ownership leads to inconsistent policy, duplicate tooling, and unclear escalation paths, which in turn creates stale credentials, missed rotations, and weak accountability for exceptions.
Impact: The organisation gets larger attack surface, higher chance of accidental outage during renewal or decommissioning, and slower response when a machine identity must be revoked or contained quickly.
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 addresses the attack and risk surface, while CIS Controls v8, NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5, NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) and CSA Cloud Controls Matrix set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | Cross-functional governance should prevent inconsistent privilege allocation for machine identities. |
| NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | A working group is needed to standardise secret lifetime and renewal ownership. | |
| NHI-01 — Improper Offboarding | Fragmented ownership often leaves machine identities active after systems or teams change. | |
| Recommendation — Set one approval standard for machine identity privileges and review exceptions centrally. Define a common expiry and rotation policy for machine identity secrets. Require a unified offboarding process for machine identities and their credentials. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-5 — Account Management | The group governs how machine identities are created, changed, reviewed, and removed. |
| Recommendation — Centralise identity lifecycle standards and enforce consistent review and revocation. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | Machine identity governance depends on consistent handling of credentials and secrets. |
| AC-6 — Least Privilege | The working group should set cross-team expectations for machine identity permissions. | |
| Recommendation — Standardise issuance, rotation, storage, and revocation of authenticators. Approve least-privilege access patterns for machine identities across teams. | ||
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | Zero Trust Architecture | The governance model supports consistent verify-and-limit trust decisions for machine identities. |
| Recommendation — Use zero-trust principles to constrain machine identity access decisions. | ||
| CSA Cloud Controls Matrix | IAM — Identity and Access Management | The subject is fundamentally about governing machine identity ownership and control. |
| Recommendation — Align machine identity governance to a single IAM operating model. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to prioritise: Start by naming one governance owner for the working group and one accountable owner for each machine identity population. If responsibility is shared, write down which decisions are centralised and which operational actions remain with the service team.
What to verify: Check that the group can actually approve standards, exceptions, and tooling choices across all relevant platforms. If it cannot resolve disputes or enforce a common lifecycle model, the organisation does not yet have a real governance point.
Practitioner takeaway: The goal is not to move every machine identity task into one team, it is to create one decision-making hub that prevents ownership drift while preserving local operational execution.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- When does a machine identity become a compliance problem?
- How do organisations operationalise NHI ownership at scale?
- What breaks when organisations rely on spreadsheets for machine identity management?
- How can organisations tell whether their identity controls are keeping up with machine-speed access?
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on September 26, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
