How NHIs Differ from Human Identities
Human identities are usually lifecycle‑managed via HR‑driven onboarding and offboarding, while NHIs are often auto‑provisioned by infrastructure‑as‑code, cloud‑native tooling, or CI/CD pipelines and can persist long after they are needed.
Human users interact manually and interactively, while NHIs behave in an automated, repetitive, and often high‑volume fashion, making them harder to monitor visually.
Why NHIs Matter
NHIs outnumber human identities, while estimates vary, some experts estimate NHI to human ratio up to 100:1, especially in mature cloud setups, particularly in containers, APIs, and automation workloads.
Many NHIs hold broad privileges, such as admin‑level API scopes or global read‑write access, yet are rarely rotated or audited like human passwords.
Such vulnerabilities make NHIs a prime target for attackers, because a leaked API key or long‑lived service‑account secret can grant persistent, elevated access to sensitive systems, as warned in NHIMG's best‑practices guide and Entro Security's governance‑best‑practices page. In addition, AI‑powered agents can dynamically reason, call APIs, and modify systems, creating highly stateful identities that legacy IAM tools struggle to track.
Many NHIs hold broad privileges, such as admin‑level API scopes or global read‑write access, yet are rarely rotated or audited like human passwords.
Such vulnerabilities make NHIs a prime target for attackers, because a leaked API key or long‑lived service‑account secret can grant persistent, elevated access to sensitive systems, as warned in NHIMG's best‑practices guide and Entro Security's governance‑best‑practices page. In addition, AI‑powered agents can dynamically reason, call APIs, and modify systems, creating highly stateful identities that legacy IAM tools struggle to track.
How Non-Human Identity Management (NHIM) Works
Generally speaking, Non‑human identity management (NHIM) is the practice of discovering, securing, and governing all NHIs across environments. Recommended high-level activities across various industry sources are:
- Discovery: Scanning clouds, APIs, directories, and secrets managers to find all service accounts, keys, tokens, and machine identities.
- Lifecycle control: Provisioning, rotating secrets, and decommissioning NHIs when they are no longer needed, following lifecycle‑focused principles.
- Access governance: Enforcing least‑privilege access and regularly reviewing what each NHI can reach.
- Monitoring and detection: Watching for abnormal behavior, such as a service account suddenly touching databases or APIs it normally does not.
- Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), "How to Manage Non‑Human Identities Effectively," 2026.
URL: https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/blog/2024/11/14/non-human-identity-management-program-guide-step-by-step
- IBM, "The Practitioner's Guide to Non‑Human Identities," 2026.
URL: https://www.ibm.com/think/insights/non-human-identity-guide
- Token Security, "Non‑Human Identity (NHI): Tutorial, Examples & Best Practices," 2012–2025.
URL: https://www.token.security/non-human-identity-management/non-human-identity
- Entro Security, "What are the best governance practices for managing NHIs?," 2025.
URL: https://entro.security/what-are-the-best-governance-practices-for-managing-nhis/
- Okta, “What are non-human identities?” 2025
- IDPro BoK, "Non‑Human Identity Management: Designing and Governing…," 2025.
URL: https://bok.idpro.org/article/id/133/