Because no single team can reliably see which identities exist, what they can do, or whether the same access has been granted multiple times in different systems. Fragmentation creates duplicate records, inconsistent policy enforcement, and incomplete audit evidence, which makes both abuse and remediation easier for attackers and insiders.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Fragmented identity stores turn access management into a visibility problem before it becomes a privilege problem. When service accounts, API keys, workload identities, and app-specific credentials live in separate directories, no team can confidently answer what exists, who owns it, or whether the same access has been granted twice. That breaks review discipline, slows incident response, and creates inconsistent enforcement across cloud, CI/CD, and SaaS systems.
This is not a theoretical concern. NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, while 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges. External guidance in the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 treats sprawl, weak lifecycle control, and shadow identities as core risk drivers, not edge cases.
Once identity state is split across tools, policy exceptions accumulate faster than anyone can reconcile them. In practice, many security teams encounter duplicate access, orphaned credentials, and audit gaps only after an incident forces a painful manual inventory.
How It Works in Practice
Access risk rises because each identity store becomes a partial truth. One platform may know the account exists, another may know it has a token, and a third may know it can reach production data. None of them, on their own, can express the full access path. That makes entitlement review incomplete and revocation unreliable.
A practical response is to centralise identity evidence, not necessarily every credential, into a single governance layer that correlates ownership, usage, privilege, and expiry. The 52 NHI Breaches Analysis and the Top 10 NHI Issues both reinforce the same operational pattern: attackers benefit when defenders cannot quickly distinguish an active workload identity from a stale one.
In mature environments, teams usually combine these controls:
- Inventory all non-human identities across cloud, code, CI/CD, secrets stores, and SaaS admin planes.
- Normalize ownership so every identity maps to a service, pipeline, or workload with a named operator.
- Correlate permissions across systems to expose duplicate grants and privilege drift.
- Use short-lived secrets and automated rotation so stale access expires even if a store is missed.
- Reconcile logs and directory exports on a scheduled basis to surface orphaned or shadow identities.
NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 supports this approach by emphasising governance, asset visibility, and continuous risk management. These controls tend to break down when identities are created ad hoc in CI/CD pipelines because ownership metadata is missing at creation time.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter consolidation often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance governance gains against release speed, platform autonomy, and legacy compatibility. Best practice is evolving, and there is no universal standard for exactly how many identity stores is too many; the risk depends on how much overlap, duplication, and unmanaged exception handling exists.
Some environments deliberately keep separate stores for regulatory boundaries, acquired businesses, or air-gapped systems. In those cases, the issue is not the existence of multiple repositories, but the lack of reconciliation and policy equivalence between them. A federated model can work if ownership, revocation, and audit logging are consistently enforced across domains.
Teams should also be careful not to treat human IAM controls as sufficient for non-human access. Service accounts and API keys often move faster than review cycles, and they are frequently embedded in build systems or application configs. Where secrets are hard-coded or stored outside dedicated managers, fragmentation compounds the problem rather than merely reflecting it. Current guidance suggests that the safest path is to reduce unmanaged identity copies first, then standardise lifecycle control second.
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 | Identity sprawl and duplicate accounts are a primary NHI governance risk. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-01 | Fragmented stores weaken identity governance and access visibility. |
| CSA MAESTRO | ID-2 | Multiple identity stores undermine consistent control of machine identities. |
Map workload identities to owners and enforce lifecycle controls across all platforms.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 24, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
