The rise of Non-Human Identities (NHIs)

If you counted every identity with access to your systems today, how many would belong to an actual human employee? The answer is probably fewer than you think.

Modern environments have shifted from being dominated by users to being dominated by machines. Applications, workloads, automation, and AI systems now create and use identities at a scale that traditional identity governance was never designed to handle.

This creates a fundamental challenge for security teams: how do you govern identities that do not behave like people? This guide explores why human identity governance breaks at machine scale, why inventory alone cannot keep pace with dynamic environments, and how lifecycle controls can bring accountability, visibility, and control to non-human identities.

The identity your security program was not built for

A non-human identity (NHI) is a digital identity that allows software, infrastructure, and automated workloads to authenticate and access resources. Unlike human identities, NHIs are not tied to an employee, a manager, or an HR record. They are created and managed by systems, often persisting long after the workloads that created them have changed or disappeared.

That difference changes the assumptions behind identity governance. Human identities follow a predictable lifecycle. People join the organization, change roles, and eventually leave. Ownership is clear, authoritative systems provide context, and governance tools can use those signals to grant, review, and revoke access. NHIs rarely fit that model. They are created automatically, change constantly, and often lack a durable owner or reliable business context. By the time a governance process catches up, the workload may have changed or disappeared while its identity or credentials remain.

The challenge is not simply scale, although scale makes it impossible to ignore. At roughly 144 machine identities for every person, governance cannot succeed by adding more reviews or assigning more approvers. When an identity program assumes every identity belongs to a person, it creates a fundamental governance gap for the identities that do not.

Why the numbers are not the real problem

A ratio of more than 100 machine identities per person sounds like a scaling problem. In reality, it exposes a governance problem. The core challenge is that most governance processes rely on contextual information that NHIs rarely provide, creating gaps in visibility and control.

Questions that are straightforward for human identities, such as who owns this identity, why it exists, whether it still needs access, and when it should be removed, often have no reliable answer.

As a result, governance begins to break down. Ownership becomes fragmented. Access reviews lose meaning because reviewers lack context. Credential rotation is delayed to avoid disrupting dependent services. Identities outlive the workloads they were created to support because no business process signals that they should be retired.

Scale also magnifies these weaknesses, creating the conditions for machine identity sprawl. As applications, workloads, integrations, pipelines, and AI agents multiply, so do the identities they depend on. Manual processes become increasingly disconnected from the pace at which NHIs are created, changed, and retired.

The inventory-first trap

Building an inventory of non-human identities is a sensible place to begin. However, it is a dangerous place to stop. Your inventory can be accurate at 10:00 and incomplete at 10:01.

As CSA's Tuhin Banerjee writes, many NHI programs begin with the goal, "Let's discover all non-human identities." He argues that this objective is already outdated in environments where identities are created dynamically, credentials exist for seconds, and trust is delegated at runtime. A complete inventory is always temporary.

The 2026 Trivy and GitHub Actions supply chain attacks also showed why knowing which identities exist is not enough to govern them. Attackers compromised runtime credentials from CI runners and reused them within minutes to access connected environments. Traditional discovery processes could later show that those identities existed, but they could not prevent the credentials from being abused, understand their active privileges, or respond quickly enough to contain the impact.

What governance actually requires

Good NHI governance gives you control over a credential throughout its lifecycle, from creation to revocation. That control begins with accountability. You should be able to answer four questions for every active identity:

• Why does this identity exist?
• What purpose does it serve?
• Who is responsible if its access is abused?
• Who can revoke it immediately?

You should be able to answer all four while the identity is active. "The platform team" is too vague. So is a repository name, project label, or old ticket. Effective governance requires a responsible owner, a current purpose, and a revocation path that works under pressure.

Accountability must then become enforceable. An owner who cannot rotate a credential safely, reduce unnecessary access, or revoke it quickly has responsibility on paper but limited control in practice. Governance requires operational capabilities that make ownership actionable.

A secrets manager turns these requirements into operating controls. It gives your team a central way to distribute credentials, bind access to approved workloads and environments, automate rotation, record activity, and revoke access without manually searching through repositories, CI settings, and production configuration.

The framework for managing NHIs at scale connects these controls to a broader lifecycle: discover the identity, assign an owner, authorize the minimum access, automate creation and retirement, and monitor how the identity behaves. Each step should produce a decision that systems can enforce. This lifecycle also makes zero trust and NHI governance practical. Every request is authenticated, access is limited to a defined purpose, and trust is continuously reassessed.

Doppler supports this approach with scoped service tokens, automated rotation, activity logs, and a Secret Health Dashboard that helps teams surface credential risks. Together, these controls carry governance decisions into the pipelines, workloads, and services where machine access actually happens.

Where to start

You do not need a complete NHI program before making meaningful progress. Start by reducing the highest-risk exposures, then build lifecycle controls into every new identity you create.

Inventory what you can, then move on

Begin with the identities that can create the most impact, i.e., those with access to sensitive systems, production environments, or the ability to delegate access further.

For each identity, capture five essentials: owner, purpose, environment, permissions, and last activity. Identities without a clear owner or business purpose should move to the top of the review queue. Credentials with broad access, excessive lifetime, or limited oversight deserve priority attention.

Do not turn discovery into a months-long exercise. Your first inventory should identify concentrated risk and establish accountability. It does not need to document every ephemeral identity before you begin improving controls.

Treat credential creation as a security event

Every new machine identity should have an owner, a defined purpose, an appropriate scope, and an expiration policy before it receives access. These requirements should be enforced wherever identities are created, whether through infrastructure-as-code, CI platforms, or internal developer workflows.

Expiration should be the default. Longer lifetimes should require a deliberate exception based on the workload's needs. This simple design choice prevents recurring failures caused by identities that outlive their purpose and credentials that remain valid indefinitely.

Replace static credentials with managed ones

Move long-lived credentials out of source code, local files, pipeline settings, and shared documents. Store and manage them through systems that support scoped access, automated rotation, activity monitoring, and rapid revocation.

Prioritize migration based on risk. Start with credentials that have broad production access, unclear ownership, no expiration, or weak rotation practices. Where possible, replace static secrets with short-lived credentials and dynamic access. For remaining workloads, establish rotation schedules and test revocation before an incident requires it.

The teams that close the NHI gap fastest treat credential lifecycle management as part of everyday engineering. As services, pipelines, workloads, and agents multiply, every identity should still have a clear purpose, a responsible owner, a limited lifetime, and a reliable way to be revoked.

For a deeper operational framework, read How to scale non-human identity management with secrets management.