How should security teams manage credentials that cannot be fully replaced with ephemeral access?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Truly persistent credentials are where NHI risk becomes operational, because they do not behave like human sign-ins and they rarely fit cleanly into normal access reviews. When a service, script, or integration cannot move to ephemeral access, the security problem shifts from “remove standing privilege” to “contain its blast radius.” That means central policy, named ownership, logging, and rotation discipline become the control plane.

This is not a theoretical issue. NHIMG research in the 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report found that 88.5% of organisations say their non-human IAM practices lag behind or merely match human IAM maturity. That gap is why long-lived secrets often persist in legacy jobs, high-availability systems, and vendor integrations even after teams adopt better patterns elsewhere. The guidance in the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 is clear that unmanaged secrets and weak lifecycle controls remain core failure modes.

In practice, many security teams discover the problem only after a buried credential has already been copied into multiple environments and no single owner can explain where it was last used.

How It Works in Practice

The practical goal is not to pretend every credential can be made ephemeral. It is to separate the few credentials that must persist from the many that can be replaced, then wrap those exceptions in strict controls. Start by classifying each secret by function, system criticality, rotation feasibility, and whether a workload identity can replace it later. Where possible, move to workload identity first, because standards such as NIST SP 800-63 Digital Identity Guidelines and NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 both support stronger identity assurance and controlled access governance.

For credentials that truly cannot be removed, best practice is evolving toward “controlled persistence.” That usually includes:

• central secret inventory with a named system owner and business justification
• policy-based access approval rather than ad hoc manual sharing
• shortest feasible TTL, even when the secret itself cannot be fully eliminated
• rotation automation with validation that downstream services still function
• tamper-evident logging of every retrieval, use, and administrative override
• segmentation so one credential cannot unlock unrelated environments

NHIMG guidance in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs and Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs and the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge both underscore that unmanaged lifecycle steps, not just theft, are what let persistent secrets accumulate and outlive their original purpose. These controls tend to break down when legacy batch systems share one credential across many services because rotation becomes risky and every dependency assumes the same secret format.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter control over persistent credentials often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance reduced exposure against uptime, vendor constraints, and recovery complexity. That tradeoff is real in mainframes, industrial systems, air-gapped environments, and third-party appliances where ephemeral access is not yet available. Current guidance suggests that these exceptions should be documented as temporary risk acceptances, not permanent design choices.

Some environments also need break-glass access for high availability, but break-glass is not the same as standing access. It should be separately approved, strongly logged, and regularly tested. In multi-cloud or hybrid estates, the difficulty is often not the secret itself but consistent enforcement across control planes, a challenge highlighted in NHIMG research and in the Top 10 NHI Issues. For teams building the long-term target state, the right direction is to replace persistent credentials with identity-native mechanisms as soon as the dependency allows, rather than normalising them as a standard operating model.

That is why persistent credentials should be treated as a shrinking exception set, reviewed on a fixed cadence, and retired as soon as the integration path supports it.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should security teams manage database and infrastructure access without relying on shared secrets or standing credentials?
• How should security teams handle trust assumptions when using ephemeral NHI credentials?
• How should security teams reduce ransomware risk from remote access credentials?
• How should security teams implement ephemeral credentials in hybrid environments?