Treat ownership gaps as a blocking issue, not a cleanup task. Start by tracing each identity to the workload it serves, then to the application and team responsible for it. If no accountable human can be assigned, the identity should be treated as unmanaged risk until the business proves why it still exists.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
When an NHI has no clear owner, IAM is not dealing with a simple inventory gap. It is dealing with an identity that may still have standing access, embedded secrets, and no accountable party for rotation, offboarding, or incident response. That creates a blind spot in governance, especially when service accounts and API keys outnumber human identities by orders of magnitude. Current practice aligns poorly with the control expectations in NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 because ownership is what makes least privilege enforceable in the first place.
NHIMG research shows the scale of the problem: in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs, only 5.7% of organisations report full visibility into their service accounts, while 68% say they do not know how to fully address NHI risk. That combination means orphaned identities often stay active simply because no one can prove they are safe to remove. In practice, many security teams discover unmanaged NHIs only after a breach review or failed audit, rather than through intentional lifecycle governance.
How It Works in Practice
The operational response is to treat ownership as a required control, not a nice-to-have metadata field. Start by identifying what workload the identity serves, where it is deployed, what secrets it uses, and which application or business process depends on it. Then map that dependency to a human owner who can approve changes, attest necessity, and accept risk. If that chain cannot be established, the identity should move into an unmanaged or quarantine state until the business proves continued need.
This works best when IAM teams combine discovery with enforcement. Typical steps include:
- tagging identities by workload, environment, and system dependency
- linking each NHI to a service catalog or application registry
- using rotation and expiration policies to expose dormant or abandoned access
- requiring a named owner before secrets can be renewed or privileges expanded
- blocking new high-risk entitlements unless ownership is recorded
For broader lifecycle discipline, the Top 10 NHI Issues page reinforces that visibility, rotation, and offboarding are recurring failure points, not one-time cleanup tasks. Pair that with the maturity expectations in NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 to keep ownership tied to governance, monitoring, and corrective action. These controls tend to break down in legacy CI/CD pipelines and shared automation accounts because the identity was created for convenience, then copied across systems without any durable accountability.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter ownership enforcement often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance faster automation against stronger accountability. That tradeoff is real, especially in environments with short-lived jobs, ephemeral build agents, or vendor-managed integrations where no single team wants to inherit the account.
Best practice is evolving, but current guidance suggests a few clear exceptions. Temporary identities can be accepted if they are time-bound, automatically created for a specific workflow, and destroyed when the workflow ends. Shared break-glass or platform accounts may also exist, but they still need explicit stewardship, logging, and review. What should not be accepted is an identity that persists indefinitely with no named custodian.
Where ownership is ambiguous, security teams should use evidence to force resolution: active authentication logs, secret-manager records, deployment pipelines, and change-management tickets often reveal the real dependency chain. If no accountable human can be assigned after that review, the safest posture is to suspend or decommission the identity until business justification is documented. That approach is consistent with the broader NHI governance lessons in 52 NHI Breaches Analysis, where unmanaged identities repeatedly appear as an avoidable risk factor.
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 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 | Orphaned NHIs lack accountable ownership and lifecycle control. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | ID.AM-01 | Asset inventory is needed before ownership gaps can be resolved. |
| NIST AI RMF | Governance is needed to assign accountability for autonomous or automated identities. |
Inventory each NHI, assign a human custodian, and quarantine identities that cannot be owned.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 7, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
