Start by collecting account-level data from every system that can create or store NHIs, then normalise that data into one identity model. The inventory must include origin, owner, purpose, access scope, and lifecycle state. Without those fields, governance tools can discover accounts but cannot safely decide what to vault, rotate, certify, or retire.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
An authoritative NHI inventory is the difference between knowing an environment exists and being able to govern it. Security teams often discover that service accounts, API keys, workload tokens, and certificates were created in different systems, by different teams, for different reasons, and never brought into one identity model. Without normalised fields such as origin, owner, purpose, access scope, and lifecycle state, tools can enumerate objects but cannot support safe decisions about rotation, certification, vaulting, or retirement.
This matters because NHI risk is usually distributed across CI/CD, cloud control planes, secret stores, SaaS integrations, and application code. NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into service accounts, while 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges. In parallel, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 reinforces the need for clear asset and access governance before control enforcement can be trusted.
In practice, many security teams encounter hidden NHI sprawl only after a secret leak, an orphaned integration, or an access review has already failed.
How It Works in Practice
Building an authoritative inventory starts with collection, not policy. Teams need to pull account-level data from every system that can create, store, or authorize NHIs, then map that data into a single schema. That schema should distinguish the identity object from the secret or credential attached to it, because one NHI may have several credentials over time.
The practical workflow usually looks like this:
- Ingest from cloud IAM, directory services, vaults, CI/CD systems, SaaS platforms, Kubernetes, and application registries.
- Deduplicate identities that appear under different labels, such as service account names, client IDs, app registrations, and workload principals.
- Enrich each record with owner, business purpose, environment, source system, last seen time, privilege scope, and lifecycle state.
- Assign a confidence level when ownership or purpose is inferred rather than directly declared.
- Link credentials, keys, and certificates to the parent identity so rotation and revocation can be executed without guesswork.
For high-trust inventories, current guidance suggests treating workload identity as the reference primitive where possible, then binding secrets and permissions to that identity. Standards such as SPIFFE overview help teams model machine identity in a way that is portable across platforms, while inventory data still needs to reflect operational ownership and business context. NHI Management Group’s JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure illustrates why inventory gaps matter: if a token exists outside the formal record, it is already outside governance.
Once the inventory exists, it becomes the control plane for downstream action: vaulting long-lived secrets, rotating exposed credentials, certifying dormant access, and retiring dead identities. These controls tend to break down when shadow IT creates NHIs directly in code or SaaS integrations because the authoritative source of creation never enters the discovery pipeline.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter inventory controls often increase operational overhead, so teams have to balance completeness against the cost of continuous reconciliation. That tradeoff is especially visible in environments with ephemeral workloads, federated SaaS, and multi-cloud estates where identities are created and destroyed faster than ticketing processes can track them.
Best practice is evolving for several edge cases. Short-lived workload tokens may not need the same lifecycle handling as durable service accounts, but they still belong in the inventory if they can authorize action. Orphan detection is also nuanced: an identity with no current owner may still be tied to a critical production path, so retirement should be staged rather than automatic. Similarly, a secret manager can be a source of truth for the credential, but not necessarily for purpose or business ownership.
Where this guidance is weakest is in legacy systems that cannot expose creation metadata or consistent unique identifiers. In those cases, teams often need compensating controls such as periodic reconciliation, manual attestation, and stricter approval gates for new NHIs. NHI Management Group’s research on the State of Non-Human Identity Security highlights why this matters operationally: only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in securing NHIs, so the inventory must be trustworthy enough to drive action, not just reporting.
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 and CSA MAESTRO address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 | Inventory starts by discovering and classifying all non-human identities. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | ID.AM-1 | Asset management requires an accurate inventory of identity-bearing assets. |
| CSA MAESTRO | M1 | MAESTRO emphasizes governance and visibility for autonomous and machine identities. |
Build a normalized NHI register with owner, purpose, scope, and lifecycle state before enforcing controls.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 23, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
