Should organisations add a new identity pillar for non-human identities?

Why the question is usually about operating model, not a new category

The need to add a separate “identity pillar” is usually a signal that the programme has not yet unified governance, ownership and control coverage. For NHIs, the practical problem is that the same access model must govern very different actors, from people to service accounts, workloads and agents, without splitting policy into parallel silos that duplicate reviews and weaken accountability.

A better test is whether the current IAM, IGA and PAM model can express the controls NHIs actually need, such as ownership at creation, lifecycle handling, credential rotation and production access constraints. When those controls are missing, the issue is usually scope and control design, not taxonomy. That is why a converged model often works better than a new pillar, especially when identity tooling already spans human and machine access.

One useful way to frame the architecture is as a converged identity model, where workforce, privileged, customer and machine identities are governed through one operating model rather than separate programmes.

What changes when NHIs are brought into the existing identity stack

Extending the existing stack does not mean treating NHIs like human users. It means preserving the same control objectives while adapting the mechanics. Humans are usually governed through interactive authentication, joiner-mover-leaver workflows and role assignment. NHIs instead need machine credential lifecycle controls, service ownership, environment separation and tighter handling of non-interactive access paths.

That distinction matters because NHIs fail in predictable ways when they are handled like ordinary accounts. Long-lived tokens, shared service accounts, weak offboarding and unclear ownership create hidden access paths that survive code changes and team changes. In practice, the right governance model is the one that can inventory the identity, prove who owns it, show what it can access, and retire it when the dependency ends.

For a practical baseline, organisations should anchor their NHI work in NHI lifecycle management and ownership and accountability, because lifecycle and ownership are the controls that most often determine whether an identity remains governable after deployment.

When a new pillar does make sense

A separate pillar can be justified when organisational structure is the real blocker, not the control model. If humans, NHIs and agent identities sit in different tooling, different queues and different owners, a dedicated pillar may help with funding, reporting and accountability. The key question is whether the new pillar improves control enforcement, or whether it simply renames an existing gap and creates another silo.

In mature environments, the better pattern is often shared policy with differentiated control paths: one identity architecture, one governance model, and identity-specific controls for provisioning, authentication and privileged access. That allows teams to preserve common policy while still treating machine credentials, service principals and automation identities as first-class governed objects.

This is where a practical reference such as the Service Account Security Guide and the broader Human vs Non-Human Identity explainer can help teams separate shared governance principles from the different operating requirements of human and non-human access.

Risk and Threat Considerations

Adding a new pillar can create false comfort if it becomes a taxonomy exercise instead of an enforcement change. The main risk is that NHIs stay fragmented across platforms, owners and credential stores, which leaves hidden access paths, stale secrets and overprivileged machine accounts in production.

Failure mechanism: Teams create a separate pillar but do not unify inventory, ownership, rotation and privileged access decisions, so credentials outlive the system or workflow they were meant to support. Attackers and insiders then benefit from long-lived secrets, orphaned accounts and weak separation between human and machine access.

Impact: This increases the blast radius of compromise, makes offboarding incomplete, and reduces the organisation’s ability to explain who can do what in production. The same failure mode is often amplified by third-party integrations and automation paths, where access is granted once and then forgotten.

For threat context, the NHI-specific failure patterns are well covered in the Top 10 NHI Issues and the key challenges and risks section of the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.

Practitioner Guidance

What to prioritise: Decide whether the organisation needs a new pillar or simply a unified control model with explicit NHI scope. If IAM, IGA and PAM can already support ownership, lifecycle and access constraints for machine identities, extending them is usually cleaner than splitting governance.

What to verify: Check whether every production NHI has an owner, a purpose, a rotation path and a revocation path. If any of those are missing, the control gap is more important than the org-chart label.

Common mistake: Treating “NHI programme” as a naming decision. The real test is whether the team can inventory machine identities, bound their privileges, and retire them when the underlying workload or integration changes.

Practitioner takeaway: The best operating model is the one that reduces unmanaged machine access, not the one that adds the most categories. If a new pillar does not improve ownership, lifecycle control and production privilege management, it is probably the wrong fix.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• Why do legacy identity tools struggle as organisations add more non-human identities and AI-driven access?
• How should security teams govern non-human identities at scale?
• How should security teams govern non-human identities for compliance?
• Why do non-human identities create more audit risk than human accounts?