They should freeze automatic approval and require an evidence check against ownership, usage trends, and business need. If the application cannot be justified in operational terms, the renewal should be reduced, renegotiated, or cancelled. The key is to make renewal a governance decision, not a default procurement event.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
When a renewal is approaching and usage is unclear, the real risk is not just overspending. It is keeping an identity, token, or integration alive without a defensible business purpose. That is how dormant NHIs, forgotten API keys, and over-permissioned service accounts stay in circulation long after the workload changed. NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs highlights how visibility gaps and poor lifecycle control let these assets persist unnoticed. OWASP’s Non-Human Identity Top 10 treats unmanaged lifecycle and excessive privilege as core exposure points, not edge cases.Security teams often assume renewal is an administrative step, but for NHIs it is a governance checkpoint. If ownership cannot be confirmed, usage cannot be evidenced, and the business cannot explain the dependency, automatic renewal becomes a control failure. The question is not whether the credential still works. The question is whether the workload still needs it, who is accountable for it, and whether the access granted still matches present-day risk.
In practice, many security teams encounter the true cost of unclear usage only after a breach review, license audit, or outage has already exposed the forgotten dependency.
How It Works in Practice
The operational answer is to treat renewal as a documented review, not a calendar reminder. Start with ownership: confirm the application, service, or integration has a named technical owner and a business owner. Then validate usage by checking authentication logs, secret vault telemetry, CI/CD references, API call patterns, and any downstream dependency records. If the NHI is active, its access should be justified by current workload behaviour, not historical convenience.NHI lifecycle discipline matters here because renewal is also the moment to decide whether the identity should be rotated, re-scoped, or retired. The NHI Lifecycle Management Guide and the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge both reflect the same operational reality: if teams cannot trace where a secret is used, they also cannot justify renewing it.
- Freeze default approval until usage evidence is reviewed.
- Require a named owner, a business purpose, and a system dependency statement.
- Compare recent activity against expected workload behaviour and change windows.
- Reduce scope where the credential is only partially used.
- Cancel or quarantine the renewal when no operational need can be shown.
This aligns with the OWASP guidance that long-lived, poorly governed NHI credentials create unnecessary attack surface, especially when they remain valid after the workload has changed. It also fits the control logic behind least privilege and zero standing privilege, where access exists only while it is actively needed.
These controls tend to break down in highly coupled legacy environments because one unclear credential often supports several undocumented downstream processes.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter renewal review often increases operational overhead, so organisations have to balance security assurance against service continuity and team capacity. The strongest approach is not always immediate cancellation. If a workload is still in use but evidence is partial, best practice is to shorten the renewal term, reduce permissions, and force a follow-up review with better telemetry.There is no universal standard for every renewal scenario yet. For shared service accounts, multi-team integrations, and vendor-managed connections, current guidance suggests treating the renewal as a dependency mapping exercise as much as an access decision. The NHI view is especially important when the same credential is reused across environments, because usage can appear low even while critical batch jobs still depend on it. The Top 10 NHI Issues is a useful reminder that hidden ownership and secret sprawl often coexist.
If the renewal supports automation rather than a human user, teams should also check whether a short-lived alternative is available. Dynamic credentials, scoped tokens, and better secret rotation may let the organisation replace a vague long-term renewal with a narrower control. Where usage is unclear and no operational evidence exists, renewal should not be treated as a default entitlement. It should be treated as a risk decision.
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-03 | Renewal without usage evidence often means stale or overlong secrets remain active. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | ID.AM-1 | Asset inventory and ownership are required before a renewal can be justified. |
| NIST AI RMF | Governance requires accountability for decisions when system use is uncertain. |
Use AI RMF governance practices to document decision ownership, evidence, and exception handling.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 11, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
