Yes. Human users, service accounts, workloads, and tokens all create entitlement risk when ownership, privilege scope, or lifecycle controls are weak. Reporting them together gives leadership one view of access exposure instead of fragmenting the problem across teams.
Why human and non-human access should be reported together
Access metrics only become leadership-grade when they describe the full population that can act in the environment. Human users, service accounts, workloads, and tokens all create entitlement risk when ownership, privilege scope, or lifecycle controls are weak. A single view helps teams compare exposure, spot drift, and prioritise remediation across the same governance model.
When organisations split reporting by team or identity type, they often hide the real question: who can do what, for how long, and under whose control? That is why Human vs Non-Human Identity is a useful reference point, because it frames the shared governance problem rather than treating people and machines as separate silos.
What metrics belong in one access view
The useful comparison is not “human versus non-human” as a naming exercise, but the control state behind each identity. Good reporting groups together ownership coverage, privilege breadth, dormant or unused access, long-lived credentials, and exceptions that bypass normal lifecycle control. That lets a board or security leader see whether the risk is concentrated in one population or spread across both.
For non-human access specifically, service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, certificates, and workload identities belong in the same reporting model because they all represent delegated access that can outlive the people or systems that created them. The definition of non-human identities is helpful here, because it makes clear that the control surface is broader than classic user accounts.
This is also where reporting should normalise the language of privilege. A workload with broad API scopes, an orphaned service account, and a dormant employee account are different objects, but the governance issue is the same if any one of them can still reach production data or critical systems.
How to make combined reporting decision-useful
Combined reporting works best when it answers three questions at once: who owns the access, how much privilege exists, and whether the access is still justified. If the report cannot show those three elements across both human and non-human populations, it is mostly inventory, not governance.
Teams usually get better results when they treat ownership and lifecycle as the common denominator. The NHI Ownership and Accountability Guide is relevant because it reinforces the core reporting principle: access that cannot be tied to a clear owner is harder to review, rotate, or remove.
At scale, the report should highlight concentration risk, such as one application team owning hundreds of service identities or one privileged group controlling many broad entitlements. That is where combined reporting becomes more than a dashboard, because it reveals whether the organisation has a reusable control model or a collection of exceptions.
Risk and Threat Considerations
Separate reports can conceal the most dangerous pattern, which is shared weakness in ownership, privilege scope, or offboarding across different identity classes. An account that is “just a service account” may be as exposed as a human admin if it carries excessive permissions or never expires, and fragmented reporting makes those cases harder to compare.
Failure mechanism: Organisations lose visibility when access metrics are split by team, platform, or identity type, so orphaned identities, stale credentials, and excessive privileges remain buried in different reports instead of being triaged together.
Impact: The result is slower revocation, weaker accountability, and a larger blast radius when any identity, human or non-human, is compromised or misused.
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 surface, NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and CIS Controls v8 set the technical controls, and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 defines the regulatory obligations.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-05 — Overprivileged NHI | Combined access metrics must expose excessive privilege across non-human identities. |
| Recommendation — Track overprivileged non-human access in the same reporting view as human entitlements. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | AU-6 — Audit Review, Analysis, and Reporting | Unified access reporting depends on reviewing audit data across identity types. |
| IA-5 — Authenticator Management | Tokens, keys and other authenticators need lifecycle visibility alongside user access. | |
| Recommendation — Correlate access logs into one review process for human and non-human identities. Monitor authenticator lifecycle and rotation status in the same access report. | ||
| ISO/IEC 27001:2022 | A.5.15 — Access control | A single access view supports consistent access governance across populations. |
| Recommendation — Apply one access-control governance model across human and machine identities. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-5 — Account Management | Account management is the shared control plane for human and non-human access. |
| Recommendation — Inventory and review all account types together under one account-management process. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
What to verify: The report should show the same core fields for every identity class, including owner, privilege scope, last-used signal, expiry or rotation state, and exception status. If one population lacks those fields, the comparison will be misleading even if the totals look complete.
Decision rule: If an access item can reach production systems or sensitive data, treat it as leadership-relevant regardless of whether it belongs to a person, service, workload, or token. That prevents “non-human” from becoming a reason to downgrade governance.
Practitioner takeaway: The goal is not to merge everything into one undifferentiated count, but to expose equivalent risk states across all identities so ownership and remediation can be decided in one place.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on October 6, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org