Because the same programme often governs both, but the controls behave differently. Human identity relies on authentication and user lifecycle processes, while NHIs add tokens, service accounts, and delegated access that can persist unnoticed. Evaluating them together exposes where coverage is fragmented and where access risk is simply moving out of sight.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Identity security planning fails when human users and NHIs are treated as separate programmes, because the control problems overlap even when the mechanics do not. Human accounts are usually governed through joiner-mover-leaver processes and authentication policies; NHIs bring service accounts, API keys, OAuth grants, certificates, and machine-to-machine delegation that can persist far beyond any human review cycle. NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 frames this as a governance and risk-management issue, not just an access-control issue, because identity scope determines what can actually be protected.
The practical risk is fragmentation. Teams often know how many employees they manage, but not how many service identities, integrations, or secrets are still active. NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, which makes isolated governance mathematically incomplete. When that asymmetry is ignored, review cadence, ownership, and offboarding standards are applied unevenly. In practice, many security teams encounter excessive access only after a leaked token or dormant service account has already been used in an incident.
How It Works in Practice
Evaluating both identity types together means building one inventory, one ownership model, and one policy baseline, while still allowing different control paths for humans and machines. Human identities usually require strong authentication, session controls, and lifecycle events tied to employment or contractor status. NHIs require a parallel set of controls for issuance, rotation, scope, attestation, and revocation, because their risk is driven by secrets and delegation rather than interactive login.
Operationally, mature programmes map each human identity to the NHIs it can create, approve, or manage. They also map each NHI to a human or system owner, a business purpose, a workload, and a retirement trigger. That lets teams answer questions such as whether a developer leaving the company also invalidates CI/CD tokens, whether a vendor change should revoke OAuth grants, and whether a service account still needs broad API access. Current guidance suggests using policy as code for repeatable decisions and using reviews that include both access entitlements and secret posture. The Top 10 NHI Issues research is useful here because it highlights how often rotation, visibility, and privilege sprawl show up together.
Where possible, align the programme to established identity governance patterns from NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, but do not assume human controls will automatically cover machine identities. These controls tend to break down in environments with unmanaged integrations, shadow IT, or code-based secret storage because ownership is unclear and revocation paths are incomplete.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter unified identity governance often increases inventory and review overhead, so organisations have to balance completeness against operational friction. That tradeoff is real, especially when legacy systems, outsourced platforms, or ephemeral workloads make identity discovery difficult.
One common edge case is delegated access through third-party applications. Human approval may create an NHI pathway that survives even after the human relationship ends, so the review process has to inspect both the person and the resulting grant. Another is shared technical accounts, where multiple teams rely on the same service identity. Best practice is evolving, but current guidance suggests eliminating shared ownership wherever possible and replacing it with uniquely attributable workload identities and time-bound access.
For broader identity programmes, the relevant question is not whether humans and NHIs are identical. It is whether the organisation can see the dependency chain between them. NHIMG’s State of Non-Human Identity Security shows that only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in securing NHIs, which is a strong signal that separate governance models are leaving blind spots. In mixed cloud, SaaS, and CI/CD environments, that blind spot is usually where the next access failure starts.
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 OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 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 | Unified inventories and ownership are core to controlling human and non-human identities. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-01 | Identity governance needs consistent authentication and access policy across both identity types. |
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | A01 | Autonomous and delegated identities need distinct runtime access controls and oversight. |
Apply one identity governance model, then tailor lifecycle and revocation controls for humans and machines.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 10, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
