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Security teams must track more than employee accounts: software workloads, service accounts, applications and AI agents also need identities, credentials and permissions. The visibility challenge is knowing which of these actors exist, who owns them, what they can access, and when their credentials should expire or be revoked. Recent Microsoft and SANS findings point to growth and governance gaps, but they do not establish a global count of machine credentials or show that every organization is losing visibility at the same pace.
What does the expanding credential layer include?
The credential layer is shorthand for several related things that are easy to conflate:
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- Identity: the software principal or actor, such as an application, service account, container workload or AI agent.
- Credential or token: the proof used to authenticate or assert access. It might be a static secret, a certificate or a short-lived token; not every machine identity relies on a long-lived API key.
- Permissions: the actions and resources available to that identity once access is granted.
Together, these form an identity perimeter alongside human accounts. Microsoft’s Digital Defense Report 2026 describes identity as a control plane spanning both human and non-human identities, including applications and agents. A useful inventory therefore needs to capture more than usernames or secrets: it must connect each identity to its owner, purpose, authentication method, permissions and lifecycle.
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Microsoft Entra Permissions Management discovered 209 million identities across its customers’ clouds in 2023: 174.3 million workload identities and 34.5 million human identities. Microsoft defines workload identities as identities assigned to software workloads such as apps, microservices and containers. In that vendor-observed customer-cloud sample, workload identities numbered about five times as many as human identities. This is not a global census, and it should not be read as a ratio that applies to every organization.
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How well do organizations manage non-human identity credentials?
SANS Institute’s March 2026 State of Identity Threat Detection and Response: Key Findings reports that 75% of surveyed organizations saw growth in non-human identities. The survey respondents were predominantly based in the United States, with additional participation from other regions; the figure describes that survey population, not all organizations worldwide.
Growth alone does not prove poor control, but the rotation finding points to a specific lifecycle challenge: SANS reports that 8% of surveyed organizations rotated most non-human identity credentials every 90 days. Rotation is only one control, and a fixed schedule is not a substitute for choosing an appropriate credential lifetime, protecting signing keys, or revoking access when it is no longer needed.
Why can non-human identities be hard to see?
Human accounts usually have recognizable lifecycle events, such as hiring, role changes and departure. Workloads may instead be created by deployment pipelines, copied across environments, or left behind when a project ends. Microsoft’s 2024 State of Multicloud Security Report notes that inactive identities can create opportunities for lateral movement and that credentials embedded in code complicate cleanup.
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Those conditions make ownership and status difficult to infer from a credential alone. A secret found in a repository does not necessarily reveal which application still depends on it, who can safely rotate it, or whether the associated identity still needs its permissions. Likewise, an identity that has not been used recently is not automatically safe to delete: teams need enough context to distinguish abandoned access from a rarely invoked but critical workload.
What changes with AI agents?
Agents add questions about who initiated them, whose capabilities they inherit, and which actions they perform. Microsoft Learn’s overview of Entra security for AI describes agent sprawl as expansion without adequate visibility, management or lifecycle controls. Agents may have their own identities or operate with user capabilities; agents created for temporary purposes can remain in production, and their permissions can exceed what their tasks require.
SANS reported that 73% of its surveyed organizations used agentic AI or automations that require credentials. That is a survey finding, not a measure of global AI-agent adoption. It nevertheless underscores why agent inventories need to record both the agent’s identity and the authority available to it, including any inherited user permissions.
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How often do organizations rotate non-human identity credentials?
In the SANS 2026 survey, 8% of surveyed organizations said they rotated most non-human identity credentials every 90 days. That result does not say how often every credential type should be rotated, or whether rotation alone makes a credential secure. Short-lived tokens, automated renewal and prompt revocation can reduce reliance on persistent secrets, where the workload identity system supports them.
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Why are organizations still getting breached despite widespread ITDR adoption?
Detection and containment are different operational outcomes. SANS reports that 68% of surveyed organizations detected identity attacks within 24 hours, while 55% contained them in that window. These survey figures do not establish why any particular breach occurred, but they show that detecting suspicious identity activity does not automatically mean access has been contained just as quickly.
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Containment requires knowing which identity is involved, what it can reach, and how to revoke or limit its access without unnecessarily disrupting a service. For non-human identities, that can be complicated by unclear ownership, credentials embedded in code, or permissions that cross cloud and application boundaries. Microsoft’s 2026 report emphasizes correlating identity signals with cloud, endpoint, application, email and network telemetry; a single alert or inventory view may not show the full path of misuse.
What controls improve visibility and reduce exposure?
Standards and vendor guidance support a lifecycle approach. The following are control directions, not a claim that any one product automatically provides complete visibility.
- Discover identities across environments. Include cloud workloads, applications, service accounts and agent deployments. Record a purpose and accountable owner so teams can investigate unexpected use and decide whether an identity is still needed.
- Review permissions against actual work. Reduce standing access to what the workload or agent requires, and examine inherited rights as well as permissions assigned directly. Microsoft’s AI guidance specifically highlights the risk of agent permissions exceeding task needs.
- Choose managed, short-lived authentication where supported. Prefer workload tokens with limited lifetimes over static credentials when the environment can issue and renew them safely. Protect signing keys through secure storage, controlled use and automated management.
- Verify tokens and preserve useful records. Apply verification and lifecycle practices described in NISTIR 8587, and retain audit trails that connect an identity to its actions. For agents, records should support attribution of actions to the agent and, where relevant, the user or process that authorized it.
- Connect identity events to surrounding telemetry. Correlate identity activity with cloud, endpoint, application, email and network signals so investigators can see related activity across systems.
- Measure response through revocation. Track the time to contain or revoke access separately from the time to detect suspicious activity. A detection metric alone does not show how long an identity remained usable after an alert.
How should teams evaluate an identity-security approach?
Compare a program or solution against the operational work it must support, not just the number of alerts it produces. The following questions turn the main visibility requirements into an evaluation checklist.
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| Evaluation area | What to establish |
|---|---|
| Identity and environment coverage | Which cloud, application, service-account, workload and agent identity types are included, and which environments are outside the inventory? |
| Inventory and ownership | Can each identity be tied to an owner and purpose? How are unknown or ownerless identities handled? |
| Lifecycle and stale identities | Can teams identify inactive or temporary identities, validate whether they are still needed, and remove them safely? |
| Permission scope | Can direct and inherited access be reviewed against the workload’s or agent’s actual task? |
| Credentials, tokens and keys | Are credential lifetimes visible? How are short-lived tokens, signing keys, renewal and revocation managed? |
| Audit and attribution | Can investigators determine which identity took an action and, for an agent, what user or process authorized it? |
| Detection and containment | Can identity misuse be correlated with connected telemetry, and can responders measure time to contain or revoke access? |
These criteria describe what to assess; the cited sources do not provide a neutral product comparison or establish that a particular tool meets every requirement. Teams should verify coverage and lifecycle behavior in the environments they actually operate.
What the evidence does—and does not—show
Microsoft’s customer-cloud discovery illustrates how workload identities can outnumber human identities in a large multicloud sample, while SANS survey results point to continued growth and limited routine rotation among respondents. NIST’s 2026 guidance reinforces short-lived workload tokens and lifecycle controls, and Microsoft’s AI guidance adds ownership, permission and attribution questions for agents.
These findings support treating non-human identities as a first-class security and governance concern. They do not provide a single global count of machine credentials, prove that every organization has the same visibility gap, or establish a universal rotation interval. The defensible goal is an inventory that connects identities to owners, permissions and lifecycle actions—and response measures that include containment, not detection alone.
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