COMMENTARY: Identity drives modern cybersecurity. Every breach report and security conference echoes the same theme: companies that control identity now control access. Organizations have poured resources into managing human identities, building elaborate systems for provisioning, lifecycle management, and compliance reviews.
Yet, while companies focus on employees, contractors, and partners, they overlook a fast-growing, risk-laden group of identities silently shaping enterprise security: non-human identities (NHIs).
[
SC Media Perspectives columns are written by a trusted community of SC Media cybersecurity subject matter experts. Read more Perspectives here.]
Service accounts, APIs, bots, workloads, and soon agentic AI form the invisible workforce of today’s IT environments. These machine identities operate behind the scenes, authenticating applications, moving data, and linking critical systems. They often hold elevated privileges and never take a break. Even more concerning, their numbers continue to grow at an astonishing rate – 4 to 10 times faster than human identities. Even organizations that have solved the human identity puzzle now face an exponentially larger, far less visible challenge.
The scale of the problem
A company can comprehend a workforce of 50,000 employees, each with defined roles, managers, and access levels. But how does an organization monitor millions of service accounts, ephemeral workloads, and machine-to-machine connections spread across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments?
Unlike people, NHIs don’t follow predictable lifecycles. They don’t join or leave the company, take vacations, or go through performance reviews. They replicate endlessly, gather permissions over time, and often remain active long after their creators forget about them. Many lack clear metadata — no job title, no department, no identifiable owner.
Consider the moment an IT analyst discovers an account labeled “svc-12345” in logs. Without context, the team can’t determine its purpose, ownership, or security posture. Does it enable a critical business process? Has someone compromised it? Should it even exist? That ambiguity creates camouflage that lets NHIs blend into the background until a breach or system failure forces attention.
Why NHIs challenge governance
Human identity governance evolved over decades. Established processes dictate provisioning, access reviews, and accountability. Managers approve access, and end users act as a frontline defense, flagging suspicious activity in their own accounts.
NHIs disrupt this model entirely. Application teams create service accounts on-the-fly. Infrastructure engineers spin up automation accounts. Developers grant bots sweeping privileges for convenience. No universal naming standards exist. Few organizations enforce consistent onboarding or define clear ownership.
Our team recently worked with an enterprise struggling to analyze login activity for a core business application. Logs revealed a single, unrecognizable NHI performing 75% of all logins. Investigation showed the account originated as a testing tool, but evolved into a shared, all-powerful credential because it “just worked.” The account embedded itself across multiple systems, including financial operations. Disabling it would have shut down the company’s ability to process payments. This scenario illustrates how unmanaged NHIs can sprawl, creating systemic risk that proves nearly impossible to unwind.
Attackers understand this blind spot well. NHIs, often operating continuously with elevated privileges, make perfect targets for external adversaries and malicious insiders.
If a cybercriminal compromises a human account and changes its password, the affected employee receives an alert. If the same happens to a service account no one notices. No employee receives a text asking, “Was this you?” This invisibility allows attackers to move laterally, escalate privileges, and maintain persistent access without detection.
Insiders can also exploit NHIs to cover their tracks. By using machine identities, they can exfiltrate sensitive data or explore restricted areas without leaving their own name in logs. In both cases, offer attackers an ideal hiding place.
Why traditional IAM tools fall short
The problem stems from organizational silos. Identity and access management (IAM) teams historically focused on human users — employees, contractors, partners. Meanwhile, app owners and infrastructure teams prioritized speed and uptime, creating NHIs as needed without engaging security teams.
As a result, tools and processes built for human identities rarely apply to machine identities. Traditional IAM products can’t keep pace with the volume, complexity, and ephemerality of NHIs. This disconnect leaves massive blind spots that attackers exploit.
Addressing the NHI crisis begins with visibility, and such visibility depends on clean identity data. Organizations must unify human and non-human identities into a single logical view. This requires resolving duplicates, eliminating orphaned accounts, and correlating entitlements scattered across multiple systems and platforms.
Without accurate, consolidated identity data, security teams can’t assign ownership, enforce least privilege, or conduct meaningful access reviews. Simply adding new tools won’t solve the problem. Leaders must first create a data foundation that reveals every identity, its purpose, and its permissions.
Treat NHIs as first-class citizens
NHIs no longer represent a minor issue. They now rank as the fastest-growing, least governed, and most over-permissioned entities the in the enterprise. Attackers know this and actively seek to exploit the gap. If identity truly serves as the control plane of modern cybersecurity, organizations must treat NHIs with the same rigor and accountability applied to human identities.
This means more than adding rules or adopting another point product. It requires a cultural shift. Developers, infrastructure teams, and security leaders must collaborate to build policies that integrate governance into the creation and use of NHIs. Clear ownership, consistent naming conventions, and automated lifecycle management must become standard practice.
Machine identities power the modern enterprise, driving automation, scalability, and innovation. But left unmanaged, they create a hidden attack surface that grows daily. Organizations cannot defend what they cannot see.
By unifying identity data, enforcing accountability, and integrating NHIs into IAM strategies, companies can regain control. Attackers thrive in the shadows, but with visibility and governance, businesses can turn the invisible workforce from a security liability into a managed asset.
Now’s the time to act. NHIs won’t stop multiplying, and threats won’t wait. Clean, unified identity data lays the groundwork for a future where every identity — human or non-human — remains visible, accountable, and secure.
Wade Ellery, chief evangelist and IAM strategy officer, Radiant LogicSC Media Perspectives columns are written by a trusted community of SC Media cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
