When should organisations extend PAM controls to non-human identities?

Why Extending PAM to Non-Human Identities Is a Security Threshold

PAM becomes necessary the moment an NHI can do more than authenticate. Service accounts, API keys, certificates, and automation identities often start as “background” assets, but once they can create resources, change policy, read sensitive data, or approve downstream actions, they are operating like privileged users. That is why current guidance treats PAM as a lifecycle discipline, not a human-only control set. The risk is amplified by the scale of NHI sprawl: NHI Mgmt Group reports that Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Standards notes that NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, which makes unmanaged privilege far harder to see and contain. For security teams, the practical issue is not whether the credential is human or machine, but whether it can reach production systems without sufficient friction, review, or expiration. That is also why PAM aligns closely with NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 principles around access control, governance, and recovery. In practice, many security teams encounter privileged NHI abuse only after a secrets leak, a CI/CD compromise, or a lateral movement event has already occurred, rather than through intentional privilege design.

How PAM Should Be Applied to Machine Identities

The most effective approach is to extend PAM to the controls that define privileged human access, then adapt them to workload identity and automation. That means every NHI with elevated reach should have an owner, a documented purpose, scoped entitlements, rotation rules, and revocation paths. Where possible, privilege should be issued just in time, tied to a task, and removed automatically when the task ends. For autonomous workloads, static RBAC alone is usually too blunt because the access pattern is not fixed in advance. A practical implementation pattern includes:

• Inventory all service accounts, API keys, certificates, and agent identities before trying to govern them.
• Classify which identities can change infrastructure, access regulated data, or trigger approvals.
• Replace long-lived static secrets with short-lived credentials and workload identity where feasible.
• Use approval, session recording, or policy checks for the highest-risk actions.
• Monitor for drift, unused privilege, and stale secrets as part of PAM operations.

This is where breach evidence matters. The BeyondTrust API key breach and the JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure show how machine credentials can become high-impact entry points when they are not managed like privileged access assets. NHI Mgmt Group’s research also shows that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, which is a strong signal that entitlement review is not optional. These controls tend to break down in highly automated CI/CD environments where credentials are embedded into pipelines, because privilege changes faster than manual review cycles can keep up.

Where the Rule Changes: Automation, Exceptions, and Overhead

Tighter PAM for NHIs often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance shorter credential lifetimes and approval gates against deployment speed and platform stability. That tradeoff is real, especially for agentic systems, scheduled jobs, and event-driven workflows that need to act without human intervention. Current guidance suggests three common exceptions deserve special handling rather than exemption. First, low-risk read-only identities may not need full PAM workflows, but they still need ownership, rotation, and visibility. Second, break-glass automation should be isolated, heavily monitored, and periodically tested, not treated as a permanent exception. Third, agentic AI systems need more than static privilege lists: they may require intent-based authorisation, runtime policy evaluation, and JIT secrets because their behaviour changes with the task. In these cases, PAM becomes part of a broader Zero Trust operating model rather than a standalone admin control. Best practice is evolving, but the core principle is stable: if an NHI can make a meaningful security decision, change state, or chain access across tools, it should be governed as privileged. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and the NHI standards guidance both support that direction, even if implementation details vary by environment. The guidance breaks down most often in legacy systems that cannot issue short-lived credentials or expose per-request policy decisions, because privilege then remains tied to static secrets and inherited trust.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• 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?
• How should security teams govern non-human identities in Salesforce?