An identity group is a collection of users or identities managed together for governance, review, or access control purposes. Groups are used to simplify certification campaigns, apply consistent policy, and organise review workflows. In practice, they help teams manage access at scale without losing control over who is included.
Expanded Definition
An identity group is a governance construct used to organise users or identities so access reviews, policy application, and certification workflows can be managed consistently. In NHI operations, the same idea extends to service accounts, API keys, workload identities, and other non-human identities that need review at scale.
Definitions vary across vendors and identity programmes, but the practical distinction is clear: a group is not itself a permission model. It is a control boundary for applying decisions to many identities at once, especially where identities change frequently or are owned by multiple teams. That makes groups useful for access recertification, role alignment, and lifecycle coordination across cloud, directory, and CI/CD environments. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 reinforces this governance-first approach by tying identity management to repeatable access control outcomes.
At NHIMG, identity grouping is most effective when each group has a clear business purpose, explicit ownership, and a defined review cadence. The most common misapplication is using groups as a shortcut for broad access, which occurs when teams add identities for convenience without testing whether the group still reflects a current governance need.
Examples and Use Cases
Implementing identity groups rigorously often introduces extra review overhead, requiring organisations to weigh operational simplicity against the cost of keeping group membership current.
- A cloud platform team groups production service accounts so quarterly certifications can confirm only approved identities retain deploy rights.
- A security team creates a temporary group for a migration project, then removes membership after validating that automation has shifted to the new workload identity model.
- A CI/CD owner uses groups to separate pipeline identities by environment, reducing the chance that a test token can reach production systems.
- An audit programme groups privileged non-human identities for review after linking ownership records to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs, which explains why visibility and lifecycle control matter across large NHI estates.
- A detection engineer maps suspicious access events to a group that includes the 52 NHI Breaches Analysis patterns and correlates them with NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 identity governance controls.
Groups are also useful for exception handling, but that value disappears if membership is static while the underlying workload or business function changes.
Why It Matters in NHI Security
Identity groups matter because they become the practical unit through which access is granted, reviewed, and revoked. If group membership is stale, every downstream policy decision inherits that stale state. In NHI environments, that can mean service accounts keep entitlements long after the workload changed, or API keys remain effectively authorised after ownership has shifted. The governance risk is amplified by scale: NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, and poorly curated groups can hide excess privilege inside a seemingly normal review process.
This is why grouping must be paired with ownership, expiry, and monitoring. The NHI Mgmt Group notes that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, a signal that broad or unmanaged group membership can quietly expand the attack surface. The same logic appears in the Top 10 NHI Issues, where visibility and privilege control remain central themes, and in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs, which frames lifecycle management as a core security discipline.
Organisations typically encounter the consequences of identity groups only after an access review fails, a breach investigation starts, or an auditor asks who approved membership, at which point the group becomes operationally unavoidable to address.
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, NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) and NIST SP 800-63 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-04 | Identity grouping affects how non-human identities are reviewed and governed. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC | Groups are a core mechanism for managing access permissions and entitlements. |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | PL-2 | Zero Trust depends on continuously evaluated identity-based access relationships. |
| NIST SP 800-63 | AAL2 | Identity assurance practices influence how grouped identities are trusted. |
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | A7 | Agentic systems often use grouped identities to scope tool and action permissions. |
Verify the assurance level behind identities before placing them in privileged groups.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on August 27, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
