Non-human identities have become a critical part of enterprise security. Applications, APIs, cloud workloads, automation scripts, service accounts, containers, and AI agents all need identities to communicate with systems and access data. Unlike employees, these identities do not sign in through familiar user-facing workflows, and many operate continuously in the background.

That creates a difficult security problem: organizations may have thousands of machine identities, but incomplete records of what they can access, who owns them, whether their credentials are still needed, and how their permissions are being used.

Non-human identity (NHI) security platforms aim to address this problem. However, the category includes several different technologies, from identity discovery and governance to workload authentication and secrets management. Choosing the right platform requires understanding which part of the identity lifecycle needs attention rather than assuming that every product solves the same problem.

What Is Non-Human Identity Security?

A non-human identity is a digital identity used by software, infrastructure, or an automated process rather than a person. It allows one system to authenticate to another and perform authorized actions.

Common examples include:

• Service accounts: Accounts used by applications, services, and background processes.
• API keys and tokens: Credentials that allow applications to communicate with APIs and external services.
• Cloud workload identities: Identities assigned to virtual machines, containers, serverless functions, and other cloud resources.
• Application identities: Service principals and application registrations used to access enterprise resources.
• Machine certificates: Cryptographic credentials used to establish trust between systems.
• Automation identities: Credentials used by deployment pipelines, scheduled jobs, and infrastructure automation.
• AI agent identities: Identities associated with AI agents that access applications, data, tools, and APIs.

Microsoft Entra, for example, identifies applications, service principals, and managed identities as workload identities within its environment. The distinction matters because a service principal, a Kubernetes workload, and an API token may require different security controls. Microsoft Learn+1

The security challenge is not simply that these identities exist. It is that they can accumulate permissions, remain active after their original purpose disappears, or continue using credentials that are difficult to trace back to a responsible owner.

Why Traditional Identity Management Is Not Enough

Traditional identity and access management systems primarily developed around human users. They commonly rely on employee directories, authentication policies, access requests, and periodic reviews.

Machine identities behave differently.

An application may authenticate hundreds of times a day without human involvement. A deployment pipeline may need temporary access to a cloud environment. A background service may require permission to retrieve information from a database. An AI agent may request access to several tools while completing a task.

These systems cannot rely on human-oriented controls alone.

Several problems make NHI security particularly challenging:

Identity sprawl: Development teams can create service accounts, tokens, application registrations, and API credentials faster than security teams can document them.

Unclear ownership: An identity may remain active after its developer leaves, an application is replaced, or a project is discontinued.

Excessive permissions: Machine identities are sometimes granted broad access because it is easier to configure a large permission set than to determine the minimum permissions required.

Long-lived credentials: Static secrets and certificates can remain valid for extended periods, increasing the consequences of accidental exposure.

Limited behavioral visibility: Organizations may know that an identity exists without understanding which resources it accesses or whether its behavior has changed.

Incomplete lifecycle management: Creating an identity is often straightforward. Tracking its usage, reviewing its permissions, rotating its credentials, and retiring it safely require more coordination.

NHI security platforms attempt to bring these disconnected activities into a more consistent security and governance process.

How NHI Security Platforms Work

An NHI security platform generally combines several capabilities. The precise implementation varies by vendor, and not every product provides every capability.

1. Discovery and Inventory

The first requirement is understanding which identities exist.

Discovery capabilities collect information from cloud environments, SaaS applications, identity providers, code repositories, secrets managers, infrastructure platforms, and other connected systems.

The resulting inventory should ideally identify:

• Identity type and associated system.
• Credential or authentication method.
• Assigned permissions and privileges.
• Connected applications and resources.
• Last observed activity.
• Associated owner or responsible team.
• Lifecycle and operational status.

Discovery is particularly important because organizations cannot govern identities they do not know about.

However, a large inventory alone does not provide security. A useful platform must also distinguish between active and dormant identities, identify relationships between identities and resources, and help teams determine which findings require attention.

2. Ownership and Context

An identity without an accountable owner creates an operational problem.

Security teams need to know which application, service, team, or business process depends on a particular identity. Otherwise, removing a suspicious or unused identity could interrupt an important production service.

Contextual analysis helps connect identities with their owners, consumers, permissions, resources, and usage patterns.

Some platforms use integrations, metadata, and automated analysis to suggest ownership. These suggestions still require validation, especially in environments where application ownership changes frequently.

3. Permission and Risk Analysis

Once an identity has been discovered and contextualized, the platform can evaluate its access.

Typical risk indicators include:

• Permissions that exceed operational requirements.
• Privileged identities with unclear ownership.
• Credentials that have not been rotated appropriately.
• Identities with no recent activity.
• Access paths to sensitive resources.
• Unexpected changes in permissions.
• Unusual authentication or usage patterns.

Risk scoring helps prioritize these findings. However, the quality of prioritization depends on the accuracy of the underlying inventory, integrations, and contextual data.

A permission that appears excessive in isolation may be required by a critical application. Security teams should therefore evaluate the actual access path and business dependency before making changes.

4. Credential and Secrets Management

Many machine identities rely on credentials such as API keys, certificates, passwords, and tokens.

A secrets management system stores and controls these credentials. Depending on the product, it may support encryption, access policies, credential rotation, dynamic secrets, and audit logging.

The objective is to reduce the exposure of static credentials and prevent sensitive authentication material from being embedded in source code, configuration files, or deployment pipelines.

5. Lifecycle Governance

NHI lifecycle management covers the identity from creation to retirement.

A mature process should include:

1. Identity creation and registration.
2. Ownership assignment.
3. Permission approval.
4. Credential provisioning.
5. Usage monitoring.
6. Periodic access reviews.
7. Permission adjustment and credential rotation.
8. Deactivation and retirement.

Lifecycle automation is particularly valuable in environments with frequent application deployments and temporary workloads.

6. Threat Detection and Response

Some platforms monitor identity activity to identify unusual behavior.

Examples include an application suddenly accessing an unfamiliar resource, an identity using permissions outside its normal pattern, or a credential appearing in an unexpected environment.

Detection capabilities can generate alerts and, depending on configuration, initiate automated actions.

Automated containment needs careful design. Revoking a production identity immediately after a suspicious event may disrupt services. Organizations should define response policies that balance security with operational continuity.

Leading Non-Human Identity Security Platforms

The products below address different parts of the NHI security problem. Some focus on discovering and governing machine identities, while others concentrate on workload authentication, privileged access, or secrets management.

They should not be treated as interchangeable products.

1. Oasis Security

NHI discovery and governance

Oasis Security developed a platform focused on discovering, contextualizing, securing, and governing non-human identities across hybrid cloud environments.

Its approach centers on building a consolidated view of machine identities and connecting that information with ownership, usage, permissions, and security posture.

Core capabilities

• Automated discovery and inventory of NHIs.
• Contextual information about identity usage and connected resources.
• Ownership identification and certification workflows.
• Security posture assessment and risk prioritization.
• Threat and anomaly detection.
• Identity lifecycle management and remediation workflows.

Oasis is particularly relevant to organizations that need visibility across fragmented cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments. Its emphasis on ownership and lifecycle governance addresses a problem that basic secrets management does not fully solve.

The platform also illustrates the growing connection between NHI security and AI agent governance.

Important product and ownership consideration: Cyera announced the completion of its acquisition of Oasis Security in September 2026. Organizations evaluating the technology should therefore assess its current commercial availability, roadmap, support arrangements, and integration within Cyera’s broader platform rather than treating Oasis as an entirely independent vendor. oasis.security+2

Best suited for: Enterprises seeking centralized NHI discovery, ownership attribution, security posture analysis, and lifecycle governance.

2. Entro Security

NHI and secrets protection

Entro combines non-human identity security with secrets management and security monitoring. Its platform is designed to discover identities and credentials, establish contextual relationships, identify excessive permissions, and help organizations manage their lifecycle.

An important aspect of Entro’s approach is connecting identities with the secrets they use and the resources they access.

Core capabilities

• Discovery and inventory of NHIs, AI agents, and secrets.
• Identity classification and ownership attribution.
• Permission and security posture analysis.
• Lineage mapping across identities and resources.
• Threat detection and behavioral monitoring.
• Credential rotation and vaulting capabilities.
• Provisioning, decommissioning, and lifecycle management.

Entro’s lineage capabilities are relevant when security teams need to understand how a credential or service account connects to applications, infrastructure, and data.

This context can help distinguish an identity that is genuinely unused from one that supports a less visible but operationally important dependency.

Its combination of NHI discovery, secrets protection, and monitoring makes it relevant to organizations that want to address several related security problems through one platform.

Best suited for: Organizations looking for integrated NHI discovery, secrets visibility, identity risk analysis, and lifecycle controls. Entro+1

3. Veza

Access intelligence and governance

Veza approaches identity security through access intelligence. Its platform focuses on understanding which identities can perform which actions on which resources.

This is particularly relevant to NHI security because simply identifying a service account does not reveal the full consequences of its permissions.

Veza’s Access Graph is designed to connect identities, permissions, resources, and access relationships across enterprise environments.

Core capabilities

• Identity and entitlement visibility.
• Discovery of machine and non-human identities.
• Access relationship mapping.
• Identification of excessive and dormant permissions.
• Access reviews and governance workflows.
• Least-privilege enforcement support.
• Visibility across cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and data environments.

Veza is especially relevant when the central question is not merely whether an identity exists, but what it can actually access.

For example, an organization may have a service account that appears to be correctly configured. An access graph can provide additional insight into whether that identity has permissions extending into sensitive data systems or privileged operations.

Its broader identity governance approach may also appeal to enterprises seeking a common view of human, machine, and third-party access.

Best suited for: Enterprises prioritizing entitlement visibility, access governance, and least-privilege analysis across complex environments. The Identity Security Platform+1

4. Aembit

Workload authentication and access

Aembit focuses on identity and access management for workloads rather than traditional human users.

Its platform is designed to help applications, services, automation processes, and AI agents authenticate to the resources they need without depending unnecessarily on long-lived static credentials.

The distinction is important. NHI discovery platforms help organizations understand their identity environment, while workload access platforms focus on controlling how workloads authenticate and obtain access.

Core capabilities

• Workload identity management.
• Identity-based access policies.
• Context-aware authentication.
• Access control for applications and services.
• Support for cloud, on-premises, and SaaS environments.
• Reduced dependence on static credentials.
• Workload and AI agent access management.

Aembit’s identity-first approach shifts the security decision away from simply possessing a stored secret and toward verifying the workload and evaluating its access request against defined policies.

This can be useful in environments where microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and distributed applications need to communicate securely.

Its value depends on how well the organization can integrate workload identity verification into its existing infrastructure and application architecture.

Best suited for: Engineering and security teams that want to control workload-to-resource authentication and reduce reliance on static credentials. DOCS

5. Delinea

Privileged and machine identity security

Delinea operates in the broader identity security and privileged access management market. Its platform extends privileged access controls to machine identities and AI agents.

This is important because machine identities often require access to sensitive infrastructure, administrative systems, databases, and production environments.

Delinea’s approach emphasizes visibility, posture analysis, privileged access control, and continuous authorization.

Core capabilities

• Discovery of machine identities and privileged accounts.
• Management of machine credentials and secrets.
• Privileged access governance.
• Just-in-time access controls.
• Least-privilege enforcement.
• Monitoring and auditing of privileged activity.
• AI agent access governance.

Delinea is relevant when an organization’s NHI problem overlaps with privileged access management.

For example, a service account with administrative permissions on production infrastructure presents a different risk from an ordinary application identity with read-only access to a limited resource.

The platform’s privileged access orientation makes it worth evaluating where machine identities have access to critical systems or sensitive infrastructure.

Best suited for: Organizations seeking to extend privileged access management and identity security controls to machine and AI identities. Identity Security Powered by Iris AI

6. Microsoft Entra Workload ID

Cloud and application workload identity

Microsoft Entra Workload ID provides identity and access capabilities for applications and services operating within the Microsoft identity ecosystem.

Its workload identity model includes application objects, service principals, and managed identities.

Managed identities are particularly useful for Azure-hosted workloads because Azure manages their credentials, reducing the need for developers to store and maintain secrets themselves.

Core capabilities

• Management of application identities and service principals.
• Managed identities for Azure resources.
• Workload identity federation.
• Conditional Access for supported workload identities.
• Risk detection and identity protection capabilities.
• Access reviews for supported service principals.
• Integration with Microsoft cloud services.

Workload identity federation is an important capability because it allows supported external workloads to establish trust through an external identity provider and obtain Microsoft Entra access tokens without maintaining conventional application secrets.

Microsoft documents supported scenarios involving Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, and other external computing environments.

However, organizations should examine the precise scope of each control. For example, Conditional Access for workload identities has licensing and identity-type limitations, and managed identities are not covered by every workload identity policy feature. Microsoft Learn+3

Best suited for: Organizations using Microsoft Entra and Azure that need native workload identity management, federation, and access controls.

7. Astrix Security

Part of Cisco

Astrix Security developed a platform focused on discovering and securing non-human identities, including service accounts, API credentials, and AI agent-related identities.

Its approach combines identity discovery with security analysis and threat detection.

Core capabilities

• Discovery of NHIs and AI agents.
• Identity inventory and contextual visibility.
• Detection of excessive permissions.
• Identification of vulnerable configurations.
• Monitoring for abnormal identity activity.
• Short-lived credential and just-in-time access capabilities.
• Security controls for agentic environments.

Astrix is relevant to organizations concerned about the growing number of application integrations and AI agents operating across enterprise systems.

Its technology is particularly interesting in environments where AI agents can interact with enterprise applications and data using delegated or application-level permissions.

Important purchasing consideration: Cisco completed its acquisition of Astrix Security, and Astrix announced that standalone sales of new licenses ended effective June 30, 2026. Existing customers continue to receive support under their agreements while its capabilities are integrated into Cisco. New buyers should evaluate its availability and roadmap through Cisco rather than assume they can purchase a new standalone Astrix license. Astrix Security+2

Best suited for: Existing Astrix customers and organizations evaluating Cisco’s developing identity security capabilities for AI agents and NHIs.

Foundational Technologies That Support NHI Security

Not every organization needs a dedicated NHI security platform. Some identity security requirements can be addressed through established workload identity standards and secrets management systems.

These technologies are not direct replacements for every NHI governance product, but they can form an important part of the underlying security architecture.

1. SPIFFE

SPIFFE, the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone, is an open standard for securely identifying software systems across different computing environments.

It defines a framework for assigning cryptographic identities to workloads. These identities can be used to establish trust between services without relying exclusively on static credentials.

SPIFFE uses a format called a SPIFFE Verifiable Identity Document, or SVID, to represent workload identity.

Key characteristics

• Standardized workload identity.
• Short-lived cryptographic identity documents.
• Support for heterogeneous environments.
• Workload-to-workload authentication.
• Foundation for secure service communication.

SPIFFE is a standard rather than a complete enterprise NHI governance platform. Its primary contribution is establishing a consistent identity model for software workloads. SPIFFE+1

2. SPIRE

SPIRE, the SPIFFE Runtime Environment, is a production-ready implementation of the SPIFFE APIs.

It performs node and workload attestation, issues identities to workloads, and helps verify the identities of other workloads.

Its architecture includes a central SPIRE Server and one or more SPIRE Agents. The server manages identity issuance within a trust domain, while agents interact with workloads on individual nodes.

Key capabilities

• Node and workload attestation.
• SPIFFE ID assignment.
• Short-lived SVID issuance.
• Workload identity verification.
• Integration with distributed infrastructure.
• Support for secure service-to-service communication.

SPIRE is particularly relevant to Kubernetes, microservices, and distributed systems where workloads need to authenticate securely across infrastructure boundaries.

It does not aim to replace a secrets manager. Its role is to provide workload identity that can help workloads authenticate to other systems. SPIFFE+2

3. HashiCorp Vault

HashiCorp Vault is a secrets management platform used to protect sensitive credentials and control access to them.

It supports workflows involving application secrets, certificates, encryption, and other sensitive authentication material.

For NHI security, Vault can help reduce the risks associated with credentials being stored directly in applications or configuration files.

Key capabilities

• Centralized secrets storage.
• Access policies and authentication methods.
• Dynamic secrets for supported systems.
• Credential rotation workflows.
• Audit logging.
• Certificate and cryptographic key management.
• SPIFFE-related functionality through its SPIFFE secrets engine.

The distinction between identity and secrets management is important. Vault can protect credentials used by a workload, but storing a secret securely does not automatically establish whether the workload should have access to a particular resource.

Organizations must still design appropriate identity, authorization, and lifecycle policies.

Vault’s SPIFFE secrets engine is also a specific feature with licensing requirements; it should not be confused with the full capabilities of an independent SPIRE deployment. HashiCorp Developer+2

4. OpenBao

OpenBao is an open-source secrets and encryption management project designed to provide identity-based access to sensitive information.

It can support organizations that want to manage secrets through a self-managed platform rather than depending entirely on a proprietary secrets management service.

Relevant capabilities

• Centralized secrets management.
• Authentication methods.
• Policy-based access control.
• Dynamic secrets and leasing workflows.
• Credential revocation.
• Encryption-related capabilities.

OpenBao is best understood as a foundational secrets management technology, not a complete NHI discovery or governance product.

It can help protect credentials, but organizations still need a process for identifying machine identities, assigning owners, evaluating permissions, and retiring unnecessary access.

Comparing NHI Security Platforms

The following table summarizes the primary positioning of the products discussed above. It is a qualitative comparison of their documented focus, not a performance ranking or an independent benchmark.

Platform	Primary focus	Particularly relevant capability
Oasis Security	NHI discovery and governance	Ownership, posture, and lifecycle management
Entro Security	NHI and secrets protection	Identity lineage and threat monitoring
Veza	Identity access intelligence	Entitlement visibility and access governance
Aembit	Workload identity and access	Identity-based workload authentication
Delinea	Privileged and machine identity security	Privileged access and secrets control
Microsoft Entra Workload ID	Workload identity management	Managed identities and federation
Astrix Security	NHI and AI agent security	Discovery and threat detection; now part of Cisco
SPIFFE	Workload identity standard	Portable cryptographic workload identities
SPIRE	Workload identity implementation	Attestation and SVID issuance
HashiCorp Vault	Secrets management	Credential protection and rotation
OpenBao	Open-source secrets management	Policy-based secrets access

The comparison highlights an important distinction: a company looking for NHI discovery and governance may not find a workload authentication product sufficient, while an engineering team trying to eliminate static credentials may not need a broad identity governance platform as its first purchase.

Understanding the Architecture of NHI Security

A practical NHI security architecture usually combines discovery, identity issuance, credential protection, authorization, and monitoring.

Each layer addresses a different part of the security problem.

Identity discovery and inventory establish which identities exist.

Identity context and ownership connect identities with their responsible teams and operational dependencies.

Permission and risk analysis determine whether their access is appropriate.

Access governance and policy define which actions should be permitted.

Workload authentication establishes whether a workload is the identity it claims to be.

Secrets and credential management protect authentication material.

Monitoring and response provide visibility into how identities behave and help teams respond to suspicious activity.

An organization does not necessarily need one product for every layer. Existing cloud identity services, secrets managers, workload identity implementations, and NHI security platforms may work together.

The challenge is ensuring that the resulting architecture has clear responsibilities and avoids gaps between tools.

How to Evaluate an NHI Security Platform

Selecting an NHI security platform requires more than comparing feature lists. The evaluation should begin with the organization’s actual identity environment and operational requirements.

1. Examine Discovery Coverage

Ask which identity types the platform can discover.

A product that primarily identifies cloud service accounts may not provide sufficient coverage for SaaS application tokens, API keys, CI/CD credentials, machine certificates, or AI agent identities.

Evaluate integrations with:

• Public cloud platforms.
• Enterprise identity providers.
• SaaS applications.
• Code repositories.
• Secrets managers.
• Container and Kubernetes environments.
• CI/CD platforms.
• Databases and infrastructure services.

Also determine whether discovery is continuous, scheduled, or dependent on manual data collection.

2. Evaluate Ownership Attribution

Discovery without ownership is incomplete.

The platform should help security teams determine which department, application, or individual is responsible for each identity.

Evaluate whether it can:

• Associate identities with application owners.
• Identify orphaned identities.
• Connect identities to employee or team lifecycle changes.
• Support ownership certification.
• Escalate unresolved ownership gaps.

Ownership information should be verifiable rather than accepted automatically from a guessed association.

3. Assess Permission Visibility

A useful NHI platform should provide more than a list of credentials.

It should help security teams understand:

• What resources an identity can access.
• Which permissions it has been granted.
• Whether it has privileged access.
• Which permissions are actually being used.
• Whether access has expanded over time.
• What the consequences of removing a permission might be.

The ability to visualize access relationships can be particularly valuable in complex environments.

4. Review Credential Management

Credential management is a major part of machine identity security.

Evaluate whether the platform supports or integrates with:

• Secure credential storage.
• Automatic rotation.
• Short-lived credentials.
• Certificate lifecycle management.
• Dynamic secret generation.
• Credential revocation.
• Secrets scanning.

A product that identifies exposed credentials but cannot connect findings to a practical remediation workflow may leave substantial work for security teams.

5. Examine Lifecycle Automation

The platform should support the full identity lifecycle rather than focusing exclusively on initial discovery.

Ask how it handles:

• New identity registration.
• Owner assignment.
• Access approval.
• Periodic access reviews.
• Permission changes.
• Credential rotation.
• Deactivation.
• Final retirement.

Lifecycle automation should include safeguards for production dependencies.

An identity should not be removed simply because it appears inactive for a short period. The organization must understand whether it supports scheduled jobs, disaster recovery, or infrequently executed business processes.

6. Evaluate Threat Detection

Behavioral monitoring can help identify compromised or misused identities.

However, buyers should investigate how detections are generated and how useful they are in practice.

Consider:

• Which identity events are monitored?
• How are normal behavior patterns established?
• Can the platform identify unusual access?
• Does it correlate activity with identity permissions?
• Can it distinguish expected automation from suspicious behavior?
• What response actions can be automated?
• Are alerts available through existing security operations tools?

Detection quality should be evaluated using representative activity from the organization’s own environment.

7. Consider Integration and Operational Complexity

NHI security affects engineering, infrastructure, identity, and security operations teams.

A platform that creates additional manual processes may struggle to deliver long-term value.

Evaluate integration with existing systems, deployment requirements, administrative overhead, API availability, reporting, and audit capabilities.

The objective should be to improve security without creating unnecessary friction for developers and infrastructure teams.

8. Understand Commercial and Support Considerations

Enterprise buyers should evaluate more than the initial subscription price.

Consider:

• Licensing based on identities, workloads, connectors, or environments.
• Costs associated with additional modules.
• Deployment and integration services.
• Support arrangements.
• Data retention and storage requirements.
• Contract terms and renewal conditions.
• Product ownership and roadmap changes.
• Availability of required capabilities in the purchased edition.

For products affected by acquisitions or commercial transitions, confirm current availability directly with the relevant vendor.

Common NHI Security Implementation Challenges

Even a capable platform cannot compensate for an unclear identity governance process.

Several implementation problems appear repeatedly across machine identity environments.

Treating Discovery as the Final Objective

An organization may successfully discover thousands of machine identities and still have little control over them.

Discovery should lead to ownership assignment, permission analysis, remediation, and lifecycle governance.

Without these follow-up processes, the inventory becomes another monitoring dashboard rather than an effective security control.

Removing Identities Without Understanding Dependencies

An identity that has not been used recently may still support an infrequent but important process.

Automatically deleting it can disrupt production operations.

Before decommissioning an identity, teams should review its ownership, dependencies, activity history, and operational purpose.

Relying on Credential Rotation Alone

Credential rotation reduces exposure associated with long-lived authentication material, but it does not correct excessive permissions.

A compromised identity with unnecessarily broad access remains a serious risk even if its credentials are rotated regularly.

Rotation must therefore work alongside least-privilege access and identity monitoring.

Ignoring Development Environments

Development, testing, and staging environments often contain credentials and permissions that are less carefully governed than production environments.

These environments may still have access to shared infrastructure, repositories, cloud resources, or sensitive information.

NHI governance should cover the full software development lifecycle.

Overlooking AI Agent Access

AI agents introduce additional identity and authorization questions.

An agent may interact with external tools, invoke APIs, retrieve documents, and perform actions on behalf of a user or organization.

Security teams need to understand which identity the agent uses, which permissions it inherits, and whether its actions can be traced to an accountable owner.

Traditional application identity controls remain relevant, but agentic systems may also require stronger context, delegation, and runtime authorization controls.

A Practical NHI Security Implementation Strategy

Organizations do not need to replace their entire identity architecture to begin improving NHI security.

A phased implementation is often more manageable.

Phase 1: Establish an Initial Inventory

Start with the most important environments, such as production cloud accounts, critical SaaS applications, code repositories, and CI/CD systems.

Collect available information about identities, credentials, permissions, and ownership.

The objective is to establish a reliable baseline rather than immediately automate every remediation action.

Phase 2: Identify High-Risk Identities

Prioritize identities that:

• Have administrative or privileged permissions.
• Access sensitive data.
• Have unknown ownership.
• Use long-lived credentials.
• Have unnecessary or unused permissions.
• Are associated with critical applications.
• Show unusual activity.

Risk should be evaluated using both technical exposure and business context.

Phase 3: Establish Ownership and Accountability

Assign a responsible owner or team to each important identity.

Create a process for updating ownership when applications change, projects end, or employees leave.

Ownership should become part of the identity lifecycle rather than a one-time documentation exercise.

Phase 4: Reduce Unnecessary Access

Review permissions and compare them with actual operational requirements.

Where possible, remove excessive access, introduce more specific policies, and use temporary or just-in-time access for sensitive operations.

Changes should be tested against production dependencies before enforcement.

Phase 5: Improve Credential Security

Move sensitive credentials into approved secrets management systems.

Introduce rotation policies, reduce unnecessary long-lived secrets, and evaluate workload identity federation or short-lived credentials where supported.

The aim is to reduce the number of credentials that applications must store and maintain themselves.

Phase 6: Automate Governance and Monitoring

Once the identity inventory and ownership model are reliable, introduce automation for access reviews, risk alerts, credential rotation, and decommissioning workflows.

Begin with controlled actions and gradually expand automation as confidence improves.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between NHI security and IAM?

Traditional IAM primarily focuses on managing access for human users. NHI security focuses on identities used by applications, services, workloads, automation, and other non-human entities.

Both involve authentication, authorization, and access governance, but their operational requirements differ.

Are service accounts and machine identities the same?

A service account is one type of machine identity. Machine identities cover a broader range of entities, including service accounts, application identities, workload identities, certificates, and other credentials used by software systems.

Is a secrets manager enough to secure non-human identities?

No. A secrets manager can protect credentials and help control access to them, but it does not necessarily provide complete discovery, ownership attribution, entitlement analysis, behavioral monitoring, or identity lifecycle governance.

A secrets manager is an important component of NHI security, not a complete substitute for every NHI security capability.

How does workload identity differ from NHI governance?

Workload identity focuses on how a software workload proves its identity when communicating with another system.

NHI governance focuses on discovering, understanding, reviewing, and managing non-human identities throughout their lifecycle.

The two areas complement one another.

Why are AI agents included in NHI security?

AI agents can authenticate to applications, use APIs, retrieve information, and perform actions through software identities.

Their access therefore needs to be governed like other machine identities. Additional attention may be required for delegated permissions, agent ownership, tool access, and activity monitoring.

Can small organizations benefit from NHI security platforms?

Yes, although a dedicated enterprise platform may not be necessary for every organization.

Smaller teams can begin with cloud-native managed identities, secure secrets management, workload identity federation, repository secret scanning, and clear ownership policies.

A dedicated NHI security platform becomes more relevant as the number of identities, integrations, environments, and governance requirements increases.

What should organizations prioritize first?

The most useful starting point is usually identity visibility.

Organizations should establish which identities exist, understand what they can access, identify responsible owners, and prioritize excessive privileges and exposed credentials.

Automation becomes more effective once these foundations are reliable.

Conclusion

Non-human identities have become essential to modern application development, cloud infrastructure, automation, and AI-driven operations. They allow software systems to communicate and perform tasks without direct human involvement, but they also create an expanding identity security challenge.

The platforms in this category address different parts of that challenge. Oasis Security and Entro focus on NHI discovery and governance, while Veza emphasizes access intelligence and entitlement visibility. Aembit concentrates on workload identity and access, Delinea extends privileged access controls to machine identities, and Microsoft Entra Workload ID provides identity capabilities within the Microsoft ecosystem. Astrix remains relevant to the market discussion, although its transition into Cisco changes how new buyers should evaluate its availability.

Foundational technologies such as SPIFFE, SPIRE, HashiCorp Vault, and OpenBao also contribute important capabilities, particularly around workload authentication and secrets protection.

There is no single platform that is automatically the right choice for every organization. The most appropriate solution depends on the identity types in use, infrastructure architecture, access requirements, existing security tools, and operational maturity.

Ultimately, effective NHI security requires more than discovering machine identities. Organizations need to know who owns them, what they can access, why those permissions exist, how their credentials are protected, and when their access should end. Building those controls into the identity lifecycle is what turns NHI visibility into meaningful security governance.