How should security teams handle non-human identity risk when traditional IAM tools do not cover service accounts and APIs well enough?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Traditional IAM was built to govern people, sessions, and approvals. That model breaks down when the protected subject is a service account, API, automation pipeline, or workload that never sleeps and often has no meaningful “user” behind it. NHI risk is not a niche problem; NHI Mgmt Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs reports that 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys.

The practical issue is visibility and control. Teams may know a service account exists, but not where it is used, what it can access, or whether it still needs standing privilege. That gap becomes dangerous when secrets live in code, CI/CD systems, or config files, because compromise spreads faster than human review cycles can react. Current guidance from NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls supports strong identity, access, and monitoring controls, but organizations still need NHI-specific operational discipline to make those controls effective for machine identities.

In practice, many security teams only discover NHI exposure after a token has been reused, a key has leaked, or an API path has already been abused for lateral movement.

How It Works in Practice

Security teams should manage NHIs as a distinct population with its own inventory, ownership, lifecycle, and monitoring model. The first step is to enumerate service accounts, API keys, OAuth apps, automation accounts, CI/CD credentials, and any workload identity used by applications or agents. From there, each identity needs an accountable owner, a defined purpose, and a documented set of allowed actions. This is not a one-time audit. The inventory must be continuously refreshed as cloud resources, pipelines, and integrations change.

Effective control usually combines least privilege, short-lived credentials, and telemetry. A mature program limits standing access, issues credentials only when needed, and revokes them automatically after use. Where possible, replace long-lived shared secrets with workload identity primitives and federated authentication, then monitor for unusual patterns such as access outside expected services, sudden privilege expansion, or new outbound connections. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 reinforces this operational model by tying identity, detect, and respond activities into an ongoing risk program. For NHI-specific lifecycle detail, Ultimate Guide to NHIs is a useful reference point.

• Inventory every machine identity and map it to a business owner and system owner.
• Rotate or retire static secrets, especially those embedded in code, config, or CI/CD workflows.
• Use policy enforcement at request time so access is evaluated against context, not just pre-approved roles.
• Alert on privilege drift, unused credentials, and suspicious API consumption.
• Automate revocation and remediation when an identity is orphaned, over-privileged, or exposed.

These controls tend to break down in highly distributed environments with many ephemeral workloads, because the identity surface changes faster than manual ownership, rotation, and review processes can keep up.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter control often increases operational overhead, so organisations need to balance reduced risk against deployment speed and engineering friction. That tradeoff becomes most visible in environments with microservices, multi-cloud integrations, third-party OAuth connections, and legacy applications that cannot easily support modern federation. Guidance is still evolving on the best way to govern these mixed estates, especially where service accounts are inherited from platform defaults rather than created intentionally.

One common edge case is a shared automation identity used by multiple tools. It may appear efficient, but it destroys attribution and makes incident response much harder. Another is third-party API access, where the token is technically valid but the business relationship or data-sharing need has changed. NHIMG research highlights the scale of this problem: only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which means many teams are trying to secure identities they cannot fully see. For breach context, the 52 NHI Breaches Analysis shows how compromise patterns repeat when rotation and inventory are weak.

Best practice is evolving toward continuous NHI governance rather than periodic access review alone. When inventories are incomplete, the right response is usually to reduce standing trust first, then improve discovery and classification over time. In the meantime, teams should treat every undocumented API key or service account as a potential incident waiting to happen.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should aviation security teams reduce identity blind spots across human, non-human, and agentic AI accounts?
• How should security teams govern non-human identities alongside human accounts?
• How should security teams protect APIs that expose non-human identity risk?
• How do security and IAM teams connect AppSec metrics to non-human identity risk?