PAM vs IGA vs NHI Management: Scope, Overlap and Who Owns What

Most organisations run privileged access management (PAM) and identity governance and administration (IGA) side by side, and still cannot say who owns the service accounts, API keys and workload identities that now outnumber their staff. PAM, IGA and NHI management are three disciplines that overlap on paper but answer different questions: PAM controls how powerful access is used, IGA decides who should have which access and proves it, and NHI management finds, owns and secures the non-human identities and secrets that neither was built around. This guide compares the three as concepts, not products: their scope, where they overlap, where gaps sit, and how to divide ownership so that every identity type has exactly one accountable process. It is for IAM leads, security architects and CISOs planning an identity programme or deciding where a new requirement belongs. For the basics of each, see the Privileged Access Management Guide, IAM and IGA Basics and the Non-Human Identity (NHI) Guide.

Key takeaways

• Each discipline answers a different question. IGA asks "should this identity have this access, and who approved it?"; PAM asks "how is high-risk access used, and was that session controlled?"; NHI management asks "what machine identities and secrets exist, who owns them, and are they safe?".
• The overlap is real but narrow. All three touch privileged service accounts. IGA certifies the entitlement, PAM vaults and rotates the credential, NHI management supplies the inventory, ownership and usage evidence. Name one owner for each step.
• The classic gap is machine identity at scale. IGA is built around a joiner, mover, leaver feed from HR, and PAM around a known list of admin accounts. Cloud roles, OAuth apps, CI/CD tokens and AI agents have neither, so they fall between the two.
• Do not force one tool to do all three jobs. Extending IGA or PAM to non-human identities works for the identities they can see; it does not discover keys in code, map SaaS integrations or track secret age on its own.
• Decide by lifecycle trigger. If access starts and ends with a person's employment, it belongs in IGA. If it is standing high-risk access used by a person, PAM controls it. If it is created by code, a pipeline or a platform, NHI management owns its lifecycle.

What each discipline is for

The three terms are often used as product categories, but they are easier to compare as control objectives.

• Privileged access management (PAM): controls the use of accounts that can change systems, security settings or other people's access. NIST defines a privileged account as "a system account with the authorizations of a privileged user". Typical capabilities are a credential vault with check-out and rotation, session brokering and recording, just-in-time elevation, and command or endpoint privilege control. The focus is the moment of use. See the JIT Access Guide.
• Identity governance and administration (IGA): manages the lifecycle and entitlements of identities, normally driven by an authoritative source such as HR. Capabilities are joiner, mover and leaver automation, access requests and approvals, role models, separation of duties (SoD) rules, and periodic access reviews or certifications. The focus is the decision to grant and the evidence that it is still right. See the Access Reviews Guide.
• NHI management: discovers and governs non-human identities (service accounts, cloud roles and service principals, API keys, OAuth apps and tokens, certificates, workload identities and AI agents) and the secrets they use. Capabilities are discovery across cloud, SaaS, code and CI/CD, ownership assignment, posture and risk scoring, secret age and rotation tracking, usage analytics and decommissioning. The focus is the identity that has no person attached. NIST's glossary describes a non-person entity as one "with a digital identity that acts in cyberspace, but is not a human actor".

The disciplines are complementary. A mature identity programme runs all three, with clear hand-offs, rather than choosing one.

Side-by-side comparison

Where the three overlap, and the gaps between them

Overlap is where duplicated effort and finger-pointing start. Gaps are where breaches start. The table shows the common shared areas and the default owner we suggest.

The leaver row matters most. When a developer leaves, IGA removes their account, but the API keys, tokens and service accounts they created do not appear in the HR feed. Without an ownership record in NHI management, those identities become orphaned. See the NHI Ownership Guide and the OWASP NHI Top 10 NHI1 Improper Offboarding Guide.

When to use PAM, IGA or NHI management

Route each new requirement by asking three questions in order.

1. Is there a person whose employment starts and ends the access? If yes, the entitlement belongs in IGA. That includes human membership of admin groups.
2. Is the access high risk at the moment of use, and used by a person? If yes, PAM controls the session and the credential, while IGA still certifies the right to request it.
3. Is the identity created by code, a pipeline, a platform or an integration? If yes, NHI management owns discovery, ownership and lifecycle. PAM may still vault the secret if humans ever need it.

The last row reflects OWASP NHI10:2025 Human Use of NHI: once a person uses a machine credential, attribution breaks for all three disciplines. See the OWASP NHI Top 10 NHI10 Human Use of NHI Guide.

Why extending PAM or IGA to machine identities falls short

Both platforms can register non-human accounts, and both are useful for the subset they can see. The limits are structural rather than product specific.

• No authoritative source: IGA works because HR says who exists. There is no HR system for API keys, so the inventory has to come from discovery and reconciliation. See the NHI Discovery Across Cloud, SaaS, CI/CD and On-Premises Environments guide.
• Onboarding is manual: PAM protects accounts it has been told about. Credentials created by developers in a cloud console or a pipeline are not onboarded unless someone finds them first.
• Review cadence does not match churn: quarterly certifications suit human roles. Workload identities can be created and destroyed many times a day, and short-lived credentials make a point-in-time review meaningless. Usage and posture evidence are better signals.
• Different reviewers: a line manager can judge a person's access; only the engineering owner can judge whether a service principal still needs a permission. The review question has to change: "is this still used, by what, and with which permissions?".
• Secrets live outside the account: the risky object is often the key in a repository, a CI variable or a ticket, not the account record. NIST SP 800-53 IA-5 Authenticator Management applies to those secrets regardless of which tool holds the account.

The reverse is also true. NHI management tools do not replace session recording for human administrators or SoD analysis across business applications. That is why the right answer is a division of ownership, not a single platform. For tooling criteria, see the NHI Security Platform Buyer's Guide, PAM Buyer's Guide and IGA Buyer's Guide.

Trade-offs and organisation size

• Small organisations: one IAM owner usually covers all three. Start with cloud-native controls (federation instead of keys, built-in access reviews, the cloud provider's privileged role activation) and a single inventory spreadsheet or register of non-human identities with owners. Buy tooling when the inventory can no longer be kept by hand. See NHI for SMBs.
• Mid-sized organisations: PAM and IGA are often in place. Add NHI discovery and ownership as a programme before buying a third platform, and feed its inventory into existing review and vault processes.
• Large and regulated organisations: separate teams per discipline are normal. The risk is three inventories that disagree. Agree one identity record per non-human identity, with a single owner field used by all three, and integrate events (leaver, rotation, revocation) between the platforms.
• Cost of duplication: running certifications on non-human accounts in IGA and posture reviews in an NHI tool doubles reviewer load. Pick one review process per identity type.
• Cost of the gap: leaving NHIs to "whoever created them" produces orphaned, over-privileged and long-lived credentials, the core of the Top 10 NHI Risks.

How to set up the operating model

1. Write a scope statement for each discipline. Use the comparison table above as a starting point and agree it with the PAM, IGA and cloud teams. Record which identity types each one owns.
2. Build one NHI inventory. Discover service accounts, cloud identities, keys, tokens, OAuth apps and agents. Reconcile against PAM's vault list and IGA's registered accounts to find what neither holds.
3. Assign an owner to every non-human identity. Use a named team and a named person. Run an attestation campaign for unowned identities and set a deadline after which unowned, unused identities are disabled. See the NHI Ownership Attestation Campaigns Guide.
4. Connect the triggers. Send IGA leaver and mover events to the NHI process so that owned identities are reassigned. Send NHI findings for privileged service accounts to PAM for onboarding and rotation.
5. Pilot on one platform first. For example, one cloud account or one Active Directory domain. Measure the inventory gap before and after, and fix the hand-offs before scaling.
6. Change the review question for non-human identities. Replace manager certification with owner attestation backed by last-used dates and permission analysis.
7. Plan rollback. Before disabling or rotating a credential, record its dependencies. Disable before delete, keep the old secret valid for a short overlap period, and keep a tested re-enable path for the observation window.

Threat model, failure modes and a worked scenario for each option

PAM

Threat model. PAM assumes a human administrator whose session can be brokered, recorded and cut off. Failure modes. When machine credentials are vaulted in a PAM tool but then copied into scripts, the vault holds the record while the risk lives elsewhere. Controls. Session brokering, just-in-time elevation and checkout approval for people. Decision criteria. Lead with PAM where humans hold standing administrative rights.

IGA

Threat model. IGA assumes access is granted through joiner, mover and leaver events tied to an HR record. Failure modes. Machine identities have no HR record, so certification campaigns either skip them or ask a manager to approve hundreds of opaque service accounts. Controls. Access requests, role models and periodic certification. Decision criteria. Lead with IGA where the main audit finding is people keeping access they no longer need.

NHI management

Threat model. The attacker targets keys, tokens and service principals that are long-lived, overprivileged and ownerless, the patterns behind NHI1 Improper Offboarding, NHI5 Overprivileged NHI and NHI7 Long-Lived Secrets in the OWASP Non-Human Identities Top 10. Failure modes. Discovery that stops at one cloud, and owners recorded once and never revalidated. Controls. Continuous inventory, owner assignment, usage-based right-sizing and automated rotation or replacement with federated credentials. Decision criteria. Lead with NHI management when machine identities outnumber people and nobody can say who owns them.

Worked scenario. After an acquisition, an audit finds a cloud access key belonging to a decommissioned integration still in use from an unknown address. PAM has no session to record, IGA has no leaver event to trigger. NHI management finds the key, traces its last use, assigns an owner, revokes it and adds a rule that new keys need an owner and an expiry. IGA then certifies that owner quarterly, and PAM governs the humans who can create keys.

Detection and measurement

Each discipline produces its own logs. The value comes from joining them.

• Log sources: PAM session and check-out logs; IGA approval and certification records; cloud audit logs (for example AWS CloudTrail, Google Cloud Audit Logs, Microsoft Entra sign-in logs for service principals); Active Directory logon events for service accounts; secret scanner findings.
• Detections that need all three: an interactive logon by a service account that is not vaulted; a non-human identity used after its owner has left; a credential used from a new network location after a vendor incident.

For a full metric set see NHI Programme Metrics and the PAM Maturity Model.

Common failure patterns

• Assuming a credential is unused: after the Okta support system breach, one service token and three service account credentials were not rotated because they were believed to be unused, and an attacker later used them. The Cloudflare Thanksgiving Breach 2023 shows why last-used data from an NHI inventory has to drive rotation decisions, not assumptions.
• "The PAM team owns service accounts": PAM rotates the ones in the vault. Nobody owns the ones outside it, which are usually the riskier ones.
• Certifying machine accounts like people: managers approve service accounts they do not understand, producing evidence without assurance.
• Leaver process stops at the person: personal access tokens, OAuth consents and keys created by the leaver keep working.
• Three inventories, three owner fields: PAM, IGA and the NHI tool each hold a different owner for the same account, so no one acts on findings.
• Treating AI agents as a new category with no home: agents are registered nowhere until an incident. Assign them to NHI management on day one and add agent-specific controls. See the Identity Governance for AI Agents Guide.

Framework mapping

Practitioner checklist

• Publish a one-page scope statement naming which identity types PAM, IGA and NHI management each own.
• Build a single NHI inventory and reconcile it against the PAM vault and IGA account lists.
• Give every non-human identity one owner field that all three disciplines read.
• Route IGA leaver and mover events into NHI ownership reassignment and personal token revocation.
• Onboard every discovered privileged service account to the vault, or replace it with a managed or federated identity.
• Replace manager certification of machine accounts with owner attestation backed by last-used data.
• Block and alert on interactive logons by service accounts outside a brokered PAM session.
• Register AI agents as non-human identities from the first deployment.
• Report the six metrics above to the identity steering group each quarter.

Standards and references

• NIST: SP 800-53 Rev. 5 Security and Privacy Controls
• NIST: Cybersecurity Framework 2.0
• NIST: Glossary, privileged account
• NIST: Glossary, non-person entity
• OWASP: Non-Human Identities Top 10 2025
• CIS: Control 5 Account Management
• MITRE ATT&CK: Valid Accounts, Cloud Accounts

Related NHI Mgmt Group resources: Privileged Access Management Guide · IAM and IGA Basics · Non-Human Identity (NHI) Guide · Human vs Non-Human Identity · NHI Governance Maturity Model