Why do organisations struggle to secure NHIs and privileged access at the same time?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Organisations struggle because NHI security and privileged access management are usually run as separate disciplines, even though both govern credentials that can reach critical systems. That split produces different inventories, different owners, and different renewal or review cycles, so a weakness in one program often bypasses the other. The result is inconsistent enforcement of least privilege, delayed revocation, and blind spots when secrets or elevated accounts drift out of policy.

This gap is visible in NHIMG research: The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report found that 88.5% of organisations say their non-human IAM practices lag behind or merely match human IAM. That is not just a maturity problem; it means the same control objectives are being managed with two different operating models. Standards such as the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls both point toward stronger inventory, access oversight, and credential lifecycle control, but many programs still apply them in silos.

In practice, many security teams encounter misuse of NHI credentials only after an elevated account or service token has already been used to reach sensitive systems.

How It Works in Practice

The practical failure usually starts with ownership. PAM teams often manage human admin accounts, while platform or application teams manage NHIs, API keys, certificates, and service accounts. When those records live in different tools, no single review sees the full access path from identity to privilege to secret. A token may look low risk in an NHI platform, while the same token unlocks a privileged workflow in production.

Effective programs begin by treating both identity classes as part of one control plane. Shared inventory is the foundation, but it must be paired with shared policy logic, rotation rules, and offboarding triggers. Current guidance suggests three operational priorities:

• Maintain one authoritative inventory for human and non-human identities, linked to system owners and business services.
• Use policy at runtime to decide whether access is still justified, rather than relying only on pre-approved roles.
• Issue short-lived secrets where possible, and revoke them automatically when a task, session, or approval expires.

This is where the NHIMG research links to practice. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs is useful for separating identity inventory from credential handling, while the Top 10 NHI Issues shows how credential sprawl and over-privilege reinforce each other. In parallel, the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls support a model where access reviews, secret rotation, and logging are not optional add-ons but core governance duties.

A practical pattern is to tie every privileged action to a current workload owner, an expiry time, and an audit trail that can be reviewed in the same workflow as human access. These controls tend to break down when legacy systems still depend on long-lived static credentials because those systems cannot support automatic revocation or consistent ownership mapping.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter governance often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance stronger control with deployment speed and system compatibility. That tradeoff becomes sharper in hybrid environments, during acquisitions, and in legacy platforms that cannot easily support modern identity controls.

There is no universal standard for every edge case yet, but current guidance suggests a few consistent exceptions. Machine-to-machine pipelines that run continuously may need different rotation windows from short-lived batch jobs. Break-glass access may still require standing privilege, but it should be tightly scoped, logged, and separately reviewed. Shared service accounts are another common exception, yet they should be treated as a temporary design debt rather than a normal operating model.

NHIMG research highlights why these edge cases matter. In The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report, 35.6% of organisations said consistent access across hybrid and multi-cloud environments is their top NHI challenge, which explains why one-size-fits-all governance often fails. The 52 NHI Breaches Analysis is also a reminder that weak rotation and over-privilege usually combine, rather than appearing alone. For broader control mapping, the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Information Security Management framework is helpful, but best practice is still evolving for how to unify NHI and PAM without slowing engineering teams.

In real environments, the hardest cases are not the well-known service accounts but the forgotten integrations, vendor tokens, and shadow automation that no one owns until a review or incident forces discovery.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• What breaks when organisations rely on always-on desktop access instead of just-in-time access for remote users?
• How do organisations simplify password resets for users who authenticate to privileged access systems with Microsoft Entra?
• How should organisations improve privileged access administration without adding more manual work?
• When should organisations use just-in-time access instead of standing privileges for high-risk identities?