What Security Leaders Need to Know About Machine Identities

What exactly are non-human identities (NHIs), and why are they becoming such a critical security concern? 

NHIs are the digital identities used by systems, applications, APIs, bots, agents, containers and cloud workloads to authenticate and operate within enterprise environments. Unlike human identities, they are not created through HR processes and often fall outside traditional governance. 

NHIs are essential to digital ecosystems but create hidden risks without visibility and governance. Securing NHIs demands merging identity, secure networking and security enforcement, ensuring only validated machine identities communicate with the least required privilege. 

Research shows NHIs now outnumber human identities in many enterprises. What’s driving this rapid growth? 

The explosion of cloud-native architectures, microservices and DevOps pipelines has shifted the balance: every workload, container, API and automation step generates its own identity. At the same time, IoT and OT devices are joining enterprise ecosystems, each requiring authentication and access. 

This growth creates opportunity for scale and agility, but only if governance and control keep pace. Bringing together identity management, secure networking and Zero Trust enables companies to grow securely, ensuring NHIs support business, not risk. 

What makes NHIs uniquely attractive targets for attackers compared to human identities? 

NHIs often have long-lived credentials, excessive privileges and no MFA protections. They can move silently across environments, blending into automation workflows. When compromised, one NHI can unlock massive lateral movement and data exfiltration. 

However, it is important to note that NHIs are not only IAM concerns; they’re also networking and security concerns. By binding identity directly to network access and layering in continuous security monitoring, we shrink the attack surface. That convergence allows us to detect abnormal service-to-service behaviors in real time, making stolen NHIs much harder for attackers to exploit undetected. 

What do breaches like SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange, and Okta teach us about managing NHIs? 

These incidents reveal that supply chain security is identity security, and that NHIs, including certificates, tokens, service accounts, are often the weakest links. They show the need for short-lived, federated credentials, strict workload verification and continuous monitoring. 

These lessons underscore the importance of converging machine identity management with secure networking. This requires designed architectures where compromised identities cannot freely traverse the network. Instead, every machine identity must be continuously validated, every connection policy-enforced, and every flow monitored so that even if an attacker steals a token, the blast radius is contained. 

Rising governance challenges 

Why do many organizations struggle to integrate NHIs into the standard identity governance lifecycle? 

The biggest barriers are a lack of ownership, fragmented tooling and the absence of HR-driven triggers that exist for humans. NHIs originate in DevOps, cloud, or vendor systems, often with no single source of truth. 

This can be overcome with a living inventory across identity, networking and security layers. This provides clarity on ownership, enforces policy at the point of creation and integrates machine identity governance directly into CI/CD workflows. By linking governance to both network segmentation and security controls, we help clients achieve accountability at scale. 

How are regulators and frameworks shaping how enterprises manage NHIs? 

Regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOX and DORA don’t mention NHIs by name but demand traceability, least privilege and accountability, all of which apply equally to machines.

As such, enterprises should demonstrate compliance by ensuring every NHI is tied to a verifiable identity, a secure network pathway and auditable policy enforcement. This convergence means enterprises can prove continuous compliance through unified reporting across identity, networking and security domains. 

Why should the C-suite and boards treat NHIs as more than a technical issue? 

NHIs are no longer a back-office IT problem; they are a core business risk. A compromised machine identity can halt operations, disrupt customer trust and trigger regulatory fines. 

Managing NHIs is crucial for business resilience. Boards should view this not just as risk reduction but as a driver for secure innovation, partnerships and growth through converged identity, networking and security. 

What practical steps should organizations take to improve visibility, control and accountability for NHIs? 

Enterprises should:

• Build a complete NHI inventory across cloud, on-prem and pipeline environments;
• Rotate secrets, automate certificate management and eliminate orphaned accounts;
• Embed least-privilege and policy-as-code controls into DevOps pipelines;
• Centralize monitoring of machine identity activity. 

It is also valuable for organizations to converge these steps with network enforcement and continuous security validation. This ensures NHIs not only exist in a clean inventory but are also restricted in how they communicate, closing the loop between visibility, control and risk reduction. 

How can teams embed NHI protections into DevOps pipelines and API ecosystems without slowing innovation? 

The key is automation. NHIs should be issued, governed and revoked automatically through CI/CD tooling, rather than through manual requests. 

Future direction of NHI security 

Where is NHI security heading in the next 3-5 years, and how should organizations prepare? 

Over the next several years, NHI security is likely to evolve in three key ways:

• The unification of human and non-human identity governance under a single, enterprise-wide fabric;
• Broad adoption of short-lived, federated credentials tied to workload attestation;
• Greater reliance on identity-driven networking, where every connection is validated at the identity layer.
  

Organizations can prepare by designing architectures in which identity, networking and security controls converge into a cohesive framework. This approach provides stronger protection against current threats while also enabling readiness for emerging challenges such as post-quantum cryptography, AI-driven anomaly detection, and the rapid growth of APIs and machine-to-machine communications. 

NHI security should not be treated as a standalone identity issue but as the intersection of identity, secure connectivity and adaptive security controls. By bringing these disciplines together, enterprises can achieve comprehensive visibility, embed governance into development pipelines, enforce least privilege consistently and detect anomalous machine behavior before it leads to disruption. The result is reduced business risk and a more resilient foundation for digital innovation.