As organizations continue to evolve and undergo massive digital transformations, managing NHIs becomes more complicated. With the dynamic nature of the cloud and the rapid creation of new identities, maintaining an inventory and security controls becomes a serious challenge worth exploring further:
Proliferation of Identities - Non-human identities now outnumber human identities by a ratio of 1:45 due to the rapid adoption of micro-services, Infrastructure as Code, cloud infrastructure, automation, and AI agents. All of these contribute to an expanding attack surface.
Visibility - Non-human identities are often managed directly within their native environments (like AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, and CI/CD platforms), rather than through a centralized identity system. This decentralized structure creates significant blind spots for security teams, making it difficult to gain comprehensive visibility into which identities exist, what they have access to, and how they behave. Without a unified view, organizations struggle to detect misconfigurations, enforce consistent policies, and respond to incidents effectively.
Operational Context - Security teams often lack visibility into key NHI attributes—such as ownership, upstream and downstream dependencies, and usage—making it difficult to enforce security policies, detect misuse, or respond to threats at scale.
Overprivileged by Nature - Many NHIs are granted excessive permissions due to misconfigurations, default settings, or a lack of granular access controls. This along with other factors such as dormant accounts lead to toxic-combinations that increase risk.
Lack of Real-Time Monitoring - NHIs often lack continuous monitoring for unusual behavior or anomalies. This leaves organizations blind to potential misuse, either by external threat actors or insiders.
Complex Lifecycle Management - The absence of automated processes makes provisioning and de-provisioning non-human identities, rotating secrets and keys effectively, and applying the principle of least privilege very cumbersome, leaving the organization vulnerable as a result.
Slow and Ineffective Remediation – Without automation, addressing NHI security risks is resource intensive and slow, allowing threats to persist longer than necessary.
No control on NHIs at runtime - Security policies are static, but NHIs operate dynamically and display different runtime behaviors.
