The assessment overstates control strength because service accounts, tokens, and API keys often carry the access that actually reaches sensitive systems. If those identities are not inventoried, owned, and reviewed alongside human access, remediation priorities will be misranked and privileged exposure will remain invisible.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Excluding non-human identities from maturity assessments creates a false baseline. The score may suggest that access governance is improving while the identities actually reaching production systems are still unmanaged. That matters because service accounts, API keys, and tokens often carry broader access than human users, and they are frequently reused across applications, pipelines, and cloud environments. NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, which makes omission from maturity reviews especially misleading.
This is not a paperwork problem. If the assessment excludes machine identities, the resulting remediation plan will prioritise the wrong controls, miss dormant credentials, and understate lateral-movement risk. That can leave secrets outside vaults, API keys without ownership, and service accounts with standing access long after the related application changed. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 expects organisations to understand assets and access relationships before control decisions can be trusted. In practice, many security teams discover the gap only after a secrets leak, incident review, or failed audit exposes how much production access was never counted.
How It Works in Practice
Identity maturity assessments usually measure inventory, governance, access review, and lifecycle controls. If the assessment scope only includes people, those measurements become incomplete by design. A platform may report strong joiner-mover-leaver discipline, regular recertification, and good MFA coverage, yet still miss the service accounts, workload tokens, SSH keys, and CI/CD secrets that bypass human workflows entirely. That is why current guidance increasingly treats non-human identity as a first-class identity category, not a separate secret-management issue.
A practical assessment should map every NHI to an owner, a system purpose, a credential type, and a revocation path. It should also distinguish between static long-lived secrets and short-lived workload credentials, because the control expectations are not the same. The most useful maturity questions are operational: Can the organisation inventory NHIs? Can it prove where each secret is stored? Can it rotate or revoke credentials without breaking services? Can it review effective access in context, not just entitlements on paper?
- Include service accounts, API keys, certificates, OAuth grants, and machine tokens in the same inventory model as human identities.
- Track ownership by application or workload team, not by generic infrastructure group.
- Measure whether secrets are vaulted, rotated, and expired according to policy.
- Check whether access reviews cover effective machine-to-machine paths, not just named users.
NHIMG research shows the operational risk clearly: only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, and 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys. That is why maturity scoring must reflect reality, not just human IAM process quality. These controls tend to break down in fast-moving cloud-native environments where identities are created automatically by pipelines and never pass through a central approval workflow.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter assessment scope often increases reporting overhead, requiring organisations to balance completeness against the effort of discovering every machine identity. That tradeoff is real, especially in distributed environments where application teams create secrets locally and cloud services mint credentials on demand. Best practice is evolving, but there is no universal standard for treating every NHI subtype identically in maturity scoring.
Some organisations try to fold NHIs into existing privileged access reviews, while others build a separate machine-identity scorecard. Either approach can work if the assessment captures the actual control owner, credential lifetime, and business impact. The mistake is to count only identities that appear in a human directory or PAM tool. As NHI Management Group’s Top 10 NHI Issues and 52 NHI Breaches Analysis show, the most damaging exposures often come from overlooked credentials that were assumed to be low value until they were abused.
In hybrid and multi-cloud estates, the assessment also needs to recognise that one workload may have several identities across platforms, each with different rotation and logging constraints. That is where maturity scores most often overstate capability: the organisation has policy language, but not consistent enforcement across environments. Current guidance suggests separating “policy exists” from “policy is enforced for NHIs” so the score reflects control reality rather than documentation quality.
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 | Covers missing NHI inventory, which is the core assessment gap here. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | ID.AM-1 | Asset inventory must include machine identities for maturity scoring to be valid. |
| CSA MAESTRO | GOV-2 | Agent and workload governance requires explicit ownership and lifecycle controls for NHIs. |
Extend asset management to service accounts, tokens, and API keys before scoring maturity.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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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
