How to Integrate Non-Human Identities (NHIs) Governance into Your Identity and Access Strategy

We’ll outline best practices for inventory, governance, lifecycle management, and monitoring that meet regulatory and business needs, giving you a roadmap to strengthen compliance, reduce breach risk, and make NHI governance a strategic asset.

Understanding Non-Human Identities

Non-Human Identities (NHIs) — service accounts, API keys, automation bots, and cloud roles — are digital entities that operate within enterprise systems without direct human interaction.

They authenticate, interact, and perform actions much like human users, but they exist solely to enable processes, applications, and services to function. NHIs can be found across every layer of modern infrastructure and are often critical to business operations.

They have quietly become the dominant population in enterprise ecosystems. In some organizations, they outnumber human identities by as much as 100:1.

Yet, despite their ubiquity, NHIs remain a compliance blind spot. Frameworks like PCI DSS, GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and NIS2 mandate access controls and monitoring, but in practice, most compliance programs still focus on human accounts.

Types of NHIs

• Machine Users: Accounts created specifically for servers, virtual machines, or other infrastructure components to perform tasks without human involvement.
• APIs (Application Programming Interfaces): Interfaces that allow software systems to communicate. Each API often requires its own authentication credentials, making it an NHI in its own right.
• Microservices: Lightweight, modular services that communicate with each other via APIs. Each microservice may have its own unique identity and set of permissions.
• Automation Bots: Scripts or programs designed to perform repetitive tasks at machine speed, often interacting with multiple systems and data sources.
• Cloud Roles: Identity constructs within cloud platforms (such as AWS IAM roles or Azure Managed Identities) that grant access permissions to services and resources.

Why They Matter

NHIs are essential for the functioning of cloud, SaaS, DevOps, and automation environments. Every deployment pipeline, cloud migration, or service integration typically creates new NHIs. This means the NHI footprint expands continuously as organizations adopt new technologies and workflows.

The very characteristics that make NHIs valuable — speed, scalability, and automation — also make them uniquely challenging to manage. Without visibility and governance, NHIs can accumulate rapidly, becoming invisible risk vectors embedded deep in the infrastructure.

The Compliance and Security Risks You Can’t Afford to Ignore

Compliance teams and security leaders are under mounting pressure to address vulnerabilities. Yet, when it comes to Non-Human Identities, the risks often remain hidden until they cause measurable damage. Here are are the most common and costly risk areas that require immediate attention.

1. Limited Visibility and Inventory
   Without a complete inventory, NHIs become unmanaged access points—unknown, unmonitored, and potentially exploitable.
2. Weak Ownership and Accountability
   NHIs often have no clearly assigned owner, making it harder to trace violations or assign responsibility.
3. Poor Credential Lifecycle Management
   API keys and service account credentials are rarely rotated or revoked, creating long-lived, high-value targets.
4. Monitoring Gaps
   NHIs frequently bypass detection mechanisms designed for human behavior — 94% of organizations lack full visibility into them.
5. Over-Privileged and Stale Accounts
   Excessive permissions and inactive accounts provide easy lateral movement paths for attackers.

The cost is real: breaches involving non-human credentials average $4.81 million, with 80% of data breaches tied to stolen or misused credentials.

Why Traditional Compliance Models Fall Behind

Current compliance controls are designed for human activity—MFA prompts, user login monitoring, behavioral baselines. NHIs:

• Don’t use MFA
• Are programmatically created and persist indefinitely
• Are difficult to baseline using human-centric monitoring tools

This mismatch leaves a dangerous governance gap.

Regulatory Requirements for NHIs

Regulators are clear: NHIs fall within scope. The challenge lies in implementing controls that work at machine speed and scale.

• SOC 2 requires strict controls and audits for all identities.
• ISO 27001 mandates continuous risk management across systems, including automation.
• NIS2 extend safeguards to APIs, scripts, and other NHIs.

Best Practices for NHI Compliance and Security

1. Establish a Comprehensive Inventory
Deploy automated discovery and mapping tools to identify every NHI across hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-prem environments.

2. Assign Ownership and Governance
Every NHI must have an accountable owner with clear auditability.

3. Implement Credential Lifecycle Automation
Automate expiration, enforce rotation, and rapidly decommission unused NHIs.

4. Enforce Least Privilege and Regular Access Reviews
Continuously adjust permissions to the minimal level needed, and review regularly.

5. Apply Continuous Monitoring and Anomaly Detection
Leverage real-time activity monitoring, anomaly detection, and automated response mechanisms.

6. Centralize NHI Management
Unify visibility and policy enforcement across all platforms.

7. Replace Static Secrets with Ephemeral Credentials
Adopt short-lived, context-aware certificates and runtime verification.

Turning Risk into Readiness

NHIs are now the primary users in digital ecosystems. Treating them as second-class citizens in compliance frameworks is a high-stakes gamble.

Forward-leaning security leaders are proactively integrating NHI governance into their compliance, risk, and identity management programs.

If you need help closing audit gaps, reducing breach exposure, and protecting brand trust, let us know.

The path forward isn’t just about passing audits — it’s about securing the most prolific “users” in your environment before attackers do.