By Brian Ramsey, VP Americas – Sales, at Xalient
The digital enterprise is no longer primarily made up of individuals’ identities. According to Gartner, over 60% of all identities in a typical organization are non-human. These Non-Human Identities (NHIs) are digital identities assigned to software, services, applications, containers, or devices that require access to systems and data. Unlike human identities, NHIs operate autonomously, at scale, and often with high privilege. This makes them essential for modern automation and uniquely vulnerable to misuse.
NHIs are particularly prevalent in cloud-native environments, DevOps pipelines, API-driven ecosystems and IoT/edge computing, where they serve as the digital “users” for automated processes, microservices, APIs, and devices, proliferating rapidly as these systems scale and integrate, making them both more numerous and increasingly critical to secure. As such, NHIs are increasing at a staggering rate and outpacing human identities by a factor of 45:1 in some environments.
While organizations concentrate on strengthening employee cybersecurity through measures like phishing simulations and zero-trust architectures, the expanding network of non-human identities (NHIs) quietly operates in the background, often without sufficient oversight. This is a major security problem as NHIs are the attacker’s dream: abundant, over-privileged, rarely monitored, and nearly invisible to traditional identity and access management (IAM) or Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) frameworks.
NHIs: The New Weakest Link
Sophisticated attackers recognize that targeting non-human identities (NHIs) is often easier than breaching traditional security measures. The vast scale and broad permissions of NHIs, combined with the exploitation ease of API tokens, hardcoded secrets, and unattended service accounts, make them vulnerable. Unlike MFA or social engineering, stealing these credentials can be done with relative ease. NHIs pose unique visibility challenges due to their proliferation across multi-cloud and hybrid ecosystems. They are often scattered across different providers and frequently tied to ephemeral resources, like containers and automation scripts, which complicate audit trails and traditional governance. The rapid pace of DevOps and shadow IT further exacerbate the issue, allowing teams to create machine identities without formal approval processes.
High-profile attacks, such as the SolarWinds Orion supply chain incident and the Microsoft Exchange exploit, have demonstrated how compromised software updates and exploited service identities can enable attackers to traverse networks undetected. The Okta incident further illustrated risks tied to service account abuse, where compromised credentials allowed lateral movement across interconnected systems. NHIs are particularly dangerous due to their lack of integration into the standard identity governance lifecycle. They are often established rapidly but can persist for extended periods without adequate monitoring or deprovisioning. Their permissions are seldom reviewed, leading to unnoticed behavior that slips beneath the radar of traditional threat detection tools, ultimately exposing organizations to systemic risks.
This creates a perfect storm: powerful, overlooked, and inherently insecure entities distributed throughout the enterprise and quietly exposing organizations to systemic risk.
Why the C-Suite Can’t Ignore This
The scale and complexity of the NHI problem is rapidly turning from an IT challenge into a boardroom issue. With regulators increasingly focused on control, accountability and cyber hygiene, NHIs have become a direct factor in compliance with SOX, GDPR, HIPAA, DORA and other data protection mandates, meaning that lapses can trigger legal penalties and regulatory scrutiny. Further, high-profile breaches are proving that a single compromised NHI can halt automated pipelines, disrupt logistics or take down customer-facing applications, thereby undermining operational resilience. As breaches involving NHIs often have longer dwell times, they drive up remediation costs, magnify reputational damage and extend the financial aftershocks. C-level executives must now treat NHIs as a core element of enterprise risk oversight, not just as a technical concern.
Consider the 2024 incident at a major logistics provider, where a forgotten containerized app with hardcoded secrets was exploited to exfiltrate shipment data. This was not a rogue insider or a misbehaving employee but a non-human identity with excessive, unattended privileges that opened the door.
With the risks intensifying across regulatory, operational, and reputational fronts, the questions that should be keeping the board up at night are: How many non-human identities are currently operating across the business? What systems and data can they access? Who or what is responsible for managing their lifecycle? Are those privileges appropriate? And what controls are in place to respond if one is compromised?
Without clear, confident answers to these questions, identity strategy is no longer defensible as it becomes a blind spot that adversaries are actively exploiting.
Visibility, Control and Accountability
Securing NHIs demands deliberate action, ongoing intelligence, and governance built for the speed and complexity of today’s digital ecosystems and far beyond what human oversight and traditional tools can deliver. Organizations must have deep, real-time visibility into every machine identity across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. This can be achieved by using behavioral analytics and machine learning, which help to classify identities, map entitlements, and detect risky patterns in context. Security should be embedded into DevOps pipelines from the start. Privileges must be tightly controlled and credentials securely stored and rotated, and Zero Trust principles should be applied to machine accounts to mitigate potential breaches.
Additionally, incident response plans must explicitly include NHIs, with playbooks for rapid containment and automated remediation. This involves removing orphaned identities, enforcing least privilege principles, and blocking abnormal activity before damage occurs. Consistent governance, proactive monitoring, and automated policy enforcement are essential to reduce dwell time, maintain compliance, and safeguard operational resilience.
An AIOps platform like MARTINA from Xalient exemplifies this modern approach, delivering continuous, intelligent oversight that aligns security outcomes with enterprise risk objectives.
From Invisible Risk to Strategic Priority
Securing identities once meant securing people, but that is no longer enough. What is connecting to your systems is now just as important as who is connecting. NHIs have become the silent enablers, and sometimes the silent threats, behind nearly every digital process. Without the right strategy and tooling, they represent one of the most urgent and overlooked risk surfaces in cybersecurity today. As breach headlines mount, boardrooms must recognize that controlling NHIs is a strategic imperative that demands intelligence, visibility, and governance equal to the scale of the challenge.
For decades, identity security has focused on humans; today, the true battleground lies in securing the machines that power digital business. NHIs are the fastest-growing, least-governed, and most exploited attack vector in the enterprise. The organizations that act now to prioritize their protection will be the ones resilient enough to withstand the next generation of cyber threats, safeguarding their systems, customers, reputation, and bottom line.
