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Non-human identity management (NHI management) is the practice of discovering, governing, securing and retiring the digital identities that software uses to authenticate and access systems. It applies identity lifecycle controls to service accounts, applications, workloads and AI agents—identities usually created and changed by technical events, not by employee hiring or departure.
What counts as a non-human identity?
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), in a definition released July 22, 2026, describes a non-human identity as an identity principal that can authenticate and be authorized, directly or indirectly, to access resources. The key idea is that an identity represents an actor in an access relationship; it is not simply any technical record or secret.
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Common examples
- Service accounts: accounts used by applications or services to access other systems.
- Application and service principals: identities representing software in an identity or cloud platform.
- Workload identities: identities assigned to running software, such as a process, container or cloud workload.
- Device identities: identities used by devices, servers or virtual machines. Microsoft describes these machine identities as a specialized subset of NHIs used to secure communication among devices and systems.
- AI agents: software actors that may use tools, access resources or delegate tasks.
An identity is not the same as its credential
An identity is the principal that is authenticated and authorized; a credential is what it uses to prove or establish that identity. API keys, OAuth tokens, certificates, SSH keys and other secrets often belong in an NHI security program because they can authenticate identities. But a key or token by itself is not necessarily an identity, and one identity may use different credentials for different actions. The distinction depends on how a particular system models the principal and its authentication.
A configuration record or a piece of code that never authenticates is not automatically an NHI. Nor should every mention of a secret be treated as a separate identity: first determine what principal the credential authenticates.
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Why do software identities need their own management?
Human identity processes usually follow business events: hiring, role changes and termination. Software identities follow technical events instead. A deployment, infrastructure provision, workload startup, pipeline run, autoscaling event or agent invocation can create or use an identity without any corresponding HR event. An employee joiner-mover-leaver process therefore cannot, on its own, reliably discover and retire every machine identity.
Software identities can also outlive the project or workload that originally needed them. If access is not revisited as systems change, unused identities and permissions may remain in place. For device identities, asset onboarding and decommissioning are often useful lifecycle triggers.
What does the NHI management lifecycle involve?
A practical lifecycle connects an identity to the workload and purpose it serves, then manages it from creation through retirement:
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- Discover and inventory: identify principals across relevant applications, cloud environments, workloads and systems. An inventory is useful only if it can be connected to the software and purpose behind each identity.
- Assign purpose and ownership: record the responsible team or owner, the application or workload supported, and why access is needed.
- Provision with least privilege: grant only the permissions required for the task. Review those permissions when a workload changes so that access does not accumulate without a current need.
- Manage authentication and credentials: prefer platform-managed identities or short-lived credentials where the architecture supports them. Rotate or revoke exposed, obsolete or no-longer-needed credentials.
- Monitor activity and review access: examine what the identity does and whether its permissions still match its purpose. Reassess access as applications, workloads and integrations evolve.
- Decommission: when a service, pipeline, project or integration ends, remove the identity and revoke associated credentials.
These controls span several capabilities rather than one guaranteed product category. Identity governance, cloud IAM, secrets management, workload identity, certificate management and monitoring can each cover parts of the lifecycle. Microsoft says its managed identities can authenticate to cloud services without requiring passwords, API keys or access tokens to be stored in application code; that is a vendor-described capability, and availability depends on the platform and architecture in use.
What should an organization control first?
Make identities accountable
Start by connecting each identity to a workload, application or business purpose and assigning an accountable owner. Without that connection, it is difficult to tell whether an identity is still needed or who can approve changes to its access.
Constrain permissions and credentials
Grant only task-required access, then review it as the workload changes. Reduce reliance on long-lived credentials where practical; use managed identities or short-lived credentials when supported, and revoke or rotate credentials that are exposed or obsolete.
Monitor changes and tie retirement to technical events
Review identity activity and permissions over time, not only at initial setup. Link decommissioning to the end of a service, pipeline, project or integration so an identity does not remain active just because no employee departure triggered its removal.
Set policy and accountability at the organizational level
The CSA distinguishes governance from management: governance establishes policy and accountability as part of enterprise risk management, while management carries that policy out through provisioning, maintenance and deprovisioning. In practice, technical teams need clear rules for owners, approvals, access reviews, credential handling and retirement.
How do AI agents change the problem?
AI agents make identity lifecycle questions more urgent because an agent may act autonomously, encounter new resources, delegate work or need different access in different contexts. Microsoft’s overview identifies short-lived credentials, real-time policy evaluation, accountability and auditability, and human oversight for sensitive tasks as relevant control considerations. These are design considerations, not a single settled technical standard that applies identically to every agent.
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A May 2026 CSA whitepaper frames agent identity as a governance challenge and notes that delegation can create identities and permissions for sub-agents. That makes it important to understand not just which agent began an action, but also what authority it passed along and how the resulting activity can be traced.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What do published NHI figures show—and what do they not show?
Published estimates indicate that software identities and secrets are a significant security concern, but their figures count different things and come from different environments. They should not be treated as a universal ratio for every organization.
| Reported finding | Attribution and scope |
|---|---|
| 144 non-human identities for each human identity in cloud-native environments, up from 92:1 in the first half of 2024 | Entro Security, as reported by the Cloud Security Alliance in 2026. This finding is specifically about cloud-native environments. |
| About 45 non-human identities per human identity on average | Entro Security, as reported by the Cloud Security Alliance in 2026, across enterprise environments. |
| 44% growth in the industry NHI population from 2024 to 2025 | Entro Labs, as reported by the Cloud Security Alliance in 2026. |
| 28.65 million hardcoded secrets added to public GitHub repositories in 2025 | GitGuardian, as reported by the Cloud Security Alliance in 2026. This counts secrets added to public repositories, not all NHIs. |
| 82 autonomous agents for each human | A 2025 vendor-research statement from Palo Alto Networks, quoted in its NHI overview by Chief Security Intelligence Officer Wendi Whitmore. This figure uses a different framing from the CSA-reported NHI ratios. |
The CSA notes that published NHI ratios vary, in part because studies differ in scope and in what they count. These figures help describe the scale of the issue in the studies’ stated contexts; they do not establish one standard NHI-to-human ratio for all businesses.
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How should you assess an NHI management approach?
When comparing a process or product, check whether it fits the systems and lifecycle events in your environment. Useful evaluation questions include:
- Which identity types and environments can it discover?
- Can identities be linked to a workload, purpose and accountable owner?
- Does it support least-privilege decisions and access reviews?
- How does it handle credential rotation, revocation and short-lived identity options?
- Can teams monitor activity and produce useful audit records?
- Can provisioning and decommissioning follow deployments and other technical lifecycle events?
- Does it integrate with existing IAM, cloud and secrets-management systems?
- Can it account for AI-agent access, delegation and oversight needs where relevant?
No single control or product category should be assumed to cover every identity type and lifecycle stage. The right approach is the one that makes the identities in scope discoverable, accountable, appropriately authorized and removable when their purpose ends.
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