Blog article by: Teleport
Scaling Trust: How to Solve NHI Challenges in Modern Infrastructure
Non-human identities (NHIs) are essential to modern operations.
But too often, they’re managed using practices – like static credentials or long-standing permissions – fundamentally incompatible with the scale and complexity of modern infrastructure.
In our recent webinar, Top Use Cases & Trends in Machine & Workload Identity, experts from Teleport and the Non-Human Identity Management Group walk through high-impact ways organizations can level-up the way that NHIs are managed across their infrastructure through three common use cases: securing CI/CD pipelines, managing infrastructure-as-code (IaC), and managing identity across multi-cloud environments.
1. Secure CI/CD Pipelines Without Long-Lived Secrets
CI/CD pipelines are among the most privileged and frequently used non-human identities in any engineering environment. These automated systems handle continuous code delivery, yet many are still authorized with static credentials like SSH keys or API tokens that are difficult to rotate and even harder to audit.
Replacing static secrets with short-lived certificates issued at runtime effectively binds access to a verifiable pipeline identity. Each pipeline receives only the permissions it needs, scoped by policy, and valid only for the duration of the job. This ensures secure automation with full attribution without adding friction to delivery workflows.
2. Bring Order to Infrastructure-as-Code and Orchestration Chaos
Infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, Ansible, and Pulumi extend automation deeper into infrastructure, but they also amplify the identity challenge. These orchestration workflows depend on NHIs that often operate with broad, persistent access and are authenticated using credentials scattered across scripts, environments, and teams.
Inside the webinar, we explore how teams are addressing this by introducing ephemeral machine identities into IaC pipelines. Instead of managing secrets or rotating tokens, orchestrators authenticate using short-lived certificates mapped to identity-aware policies. This unifies access control, simplifies lifecycle governance, and ensures traceability.
3. Federate Workload Identity Across Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Environments
Across AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-prem data centers, NHIs must authenticate across fragmented trust boundaries. The result is often a patchwork of IAM roles, one-off integrations, and hardcoded keys that are difficult (if not impossible) to accurately manage at scale.
A federated approach to workload identity solves this challenge. Issuing SPIFFE-compatible, cryptographically-verifiable certificates enables trust to sustain across environments, removing the need for long-lived secrets and brittle access patterns.
With this model, NHIs become portable, governed identities that support Zero Trust principles, reduce credential sprawl, and streamline authentication across clouds.
Watch the on-demand webinar to go deeper into each use case and see a live demo of how Teleport solves these NHI challenges.
→ Top Use Cases & Trends in Machine & Workload Identity: 47-minute webinar hosted by Teleport and the Non-Human Identity Management Group.
