Non-Human Identities are Becoming a Growing Security Risk

Organizations are creating huge numbers of non-human identities (NHIs), such as service accounts, API keys, certificates, tokens, cloud workloads, automation tools, and AI agents. These machine identities now power modern applications and cloud services, but many organizations still apply identity controls designed primarily for human users. As a result, NHIs often lack proper visibility, lifecycle management, ownership tracking, and governance.

The rise of cloud-native architectures, automation, and AI is accelerating this challenge. Every new application, integration, microservice, or autonomous AI workflow can create additional machine credentials that require authentication and access permissions. This study found that managing these identities manually becomes increasingly difficult as environments scale.

Unmanaged machine identities create new security risks

When organizations lose track of non-human identities, attackers gain opportunities to exploit forgotten credentials, overprivileged service accounts, exposed API keys, and unmanaged secrets. These identities frequently operate behind the scenes and may have broad access to systems and data, and a compromised NHI can become an attractive entry point for cyberattacks.

This report argues that the rapid expansion of NHIs is creating operational, security, and compliance risks. Poorly governed machine identities can lead to unauthorized access, data exposure, audit challenges, and increased difficulty responding to incidents. As organizations deploy more AI-powered and automated services, these risks can multiply because each automated workflow may depend on multiple interconnected machine credentials.

Organizations need a dedicated Non-Human Identity strategy

This report recommends adopting a dedicated Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) strategy rather than treating machine credentials as a secondary IAM concern. Key elements include continuously discovering and inventorying NHIs, enforcing lifecycle management, rotating credentials automatically, reducing excessive privileges, and monitoring machine-to-machine activity for suspicious behavior.

Organizations are also encouraged to align NHI security with Zero Trust principles by authenticating and validating machine identities continuously instead of relying on long-lived credentials. Moreover, greater automation, centralized governance, and stronger credential management can help security teams maintain visibility as machine identities continue to proliferate across cloud and AI environments.

Stronger governance requires additional investment

It’s important to note that implementing a formal NHIM program can improve security, compliance, and operational resilience, but it also introduces additional complexity. Organizations may need new discovery tools, policy frameworks, automation capabilities, and governance processes to manage machine identities effectively.

However, this report mentions that these investments are becoming increasingly necessary as automation and AI adoption accelerate. The alternative is allowing unmanaged machine identities to accumulate, which increases both security exposure and the operational burden of maintaining modern digital infrastructure.