“Your Biggest Identity Risk May Not Be Human”: The Rise of Machine Identities  

“Identity is the fundamental currency in any technology transaction, so we need to treat nonhuman assets with the same care as we apply to people,” writes Simon Gooch, Field CIO at Saviynt, in a recent TechRadar Pro piece on identity strategy.  

He’s pointing at something most security teams already sense but rarely say out loud: non-human identities, service accounts, bots, tokens, and scripts, now outnumber human employees by ratios that would have sounded absurd a decade ago. They don’t sit through onboarding. They don’t get offboarded when a project ends. And yet many of them quietly hold access that would alarm any CISO if a person held it unchecked.  

That gap is exactly what Non-Human & Machine Identity Management exists to close. 

What Exactly Are Non-Human and Machine Identities? 

A non-human identity is any digital credential assigned to software instead of a person: a service account querying a database, an API key linking two apps together, a script running a nightly job, or a container spinning up for a few seconds to process a task. Machine identities are a slightly narrower slice of that world, referring specifically to infrastructure components like servers, containers, and IoT devices that authenticate using certificates or cryptographic keys rather than passwords. 

Put simply, every machine identity is non-human, but not every non-human identity is strictly a “machine” in the infrastructure sense.  

A chatbot integration or an automation script counts too. This distinction matters because Non-Human Identity Management and Machine Identity Management often get lumped together, when in practice they need slightly different tools and oversight. 

What’s undeniable is the scale. Industry research from KPMG’s Cybersecurity Considerations 2026 report puts the ratio of machine identities to human employees at roughly 80 to 1 in the average enterprise, a number that climbs sharply higher in cloud-native environments. These identities don’t clock in, don’t sit through security awareness training, and rarely get offboarded the way a departing employee does. 

Non-Human & Machine Identity Management: Why It’s the Blind Spot Nobody Budgeted For 

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Studies have found that a large share of permissions granted to non-human identities go entirely unused, yet a significant portion of those same permissions are classified as high-risk.  

Translation: a forgotten integration token or an old deployment script might be sitting on admin-level access nobody remembers granting, let alone reviewing. 

That gap is exactly why Non-Human & Machine Identity Management deserves a seat at the same table as human identity governance, not a footnote below it. Credential-based attacks remain one of the most common ways intruders get their first foothold, and compromised service accounts or leaked API keys are frequently the entry point. Once inside, an over-permissioned machine identity can move laterally with far less friction than a compromised human account, simply because nobody’s watching for unusual behavior from a script that “always runs at 2 a.m. anyway.” 

This is where catching identity threats in real time makes all the difference. Security teams that pair strong access hygiene with Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR) stand a much better chance of spotting a dormant token that suddenly reaches into a system it’s never touched before, before it snowballs into a full breach. 

The New Wrinkle: AI Agents Are Joining the Identity Pool 

If managing service accounts and tokens felt manageable a few years ago, the rise of autonomous AI agents has changed the math considerably. These agents don’t just execute a fixed script; they make decisions, chain together multiple actions, and often need broader access to be useful. That makes them a genuinely new category of risk, one that traditional identity tools weren’t designed with in mind. 

Curious what it actually takes to keep an AI agent’s credentials from becoming your weakest link? It’s worth a closer look at securing AI agent identities before rolling any agents out further. Treating an AI agent’s credentials with the same rigor you’d apply to a human administrator, rather than as just another script, goes a long way toward keeping this new frontier from becoming tomorrow’s headline breach. 

Building a Non-Human & Machine Identity Management Program 

None of this has to feel overwhelming. Most organizations that get this right follow a fairly consistent playbook: 

• Discover everything first: You can’t govern what you can’t see, so start by cataloguing every service account, token, and workload identity across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem environments. 

• Scope access tightly: Give each identity only what it needs for its specific job, nothing more. A deployment script rarely needs access to customer data. 

• Assign real ownership: Every non-human identity should be tied to an actual person or team responsible for reviewing and eventually retiring it. 

• Monitor behavior, not just logins: Machine identities don’t log in the way people do, but they do leave behavioral fingerprints worth watching. 

• Rotate credentials on a schedule: Long-lived, hardcoded secrets are a gift to attackers. Rotate early and often. If you’re not sure your current setup can pull this off, it’s worth knowing your secrets management inside and out before assuming it’s covered. 

• Decommission promptly: When a project ends or an integration is retired, its identity should disappear with it, not linger for years unnoticed. 

For identities that carry elevated or administrative rights, the fundamentals of privileged access deserve their own layer of scrutiny. Our Privileged Access Management (PAM) Guide breaks down how to keep the highest-risk accounts on a tighter leash instead of lumping them in with everything else.  

Common Mistakes That Quietly Undo Good Intentions 

Even teams that genuinely care about this often trip up on the same handful of issues. Tools stay fragmented, with secrets managers, cloud consoles, and spreadsheets all holding a piece of the picture but never talking to each other. Ownership stays vague, so credentials outlive their purpose simply because no one’s job is to notice. And access reviews, when they happen at all, tend to focus almost entirely on human accounts, leaving machine identities to slide through unexamined. 

None of these are exotic problems. They’re organizational habits, and habits can be changed with the right process and the right visibility in place. 

Bringing It All Together 

Non-human and machine identities aren’t going away, and honestly, they shouldn’t. They’re what makes modern automation, cloud infrastructure, and increasingly, AI-driven workflows possible in the first place. The goal was never to eliminate them, but to know exactly what they can access, who’s accountable for them, and when it’s time to let one go. 

This is exactly the kind of work Know All Edge handles day to day: helping organizations design and implement the right identity and secrets management framework for their environment, then staying on as an ongoing partner to monitor, fine-tune, and support it as things evolve. If sorting out your organization’s approach to secrets management is somewhere on this quarter’s list, you can connect with us to start that conversation. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

What’s the difference between non-human identity management and machine identity management?  

Machine identity management is the narrower of the two. It focuses on infrastructure components, like servers, containers, and IoT devices, authenticated through certificates or cryptographic keys. Non-human identity management is the broader umbrella: 

• Service accounts 

• API tokens and OAuth credentials 

• Automation scripts and bots 

• All machine identities 

Most organizations end up needing both working together rather than treating them as separate problems. 

Why do non-human identities carry more risk than human accounts?  

They’re often over-permissioned right at creation and then rarely revisited afterward. Since they don’t “log in” the way people do, there’s no obvious signal, like an odd login time or unfamiliar location, to flag suspicious activity. A compromised service account can sit quietly for months, using legitimate-looking access to move through systems, which is exactly why unused or excessive permissions on machine accounts tend to be the riskiest blind spot in most environments. 

How often should machine credentials be rotated?  

There’s no single universal number, but the principle holds everywhere: the more privileged the credential, the more frequently it should rotate. Good practice generally includes: 

• Rotating high-privilege credentials on a tight, defined schedule 

• Avoiding long-lived or hardcoded secrets altogether 

• Setting automatic expiration wherever the system supports it 

Skipping rotation is one of the easiest ways for an old, forgotten credential to quietly become an open door. 

Can existing IAM tools handle non-human identities, or do you need something separate?  

Traditional IAM platforms were largely built around human onboarding and offboarding patterns, so they often struggle with the sheer scale and pace at which non-human identities get created and retired. Many organizations end up supplementing their existing IAM stack with purpose-built discovery and governance tools that can track ephemeral, machine-speed identity changes that standard periodic reviews simply miss. 

Do AI agents count as non-human identities?  

Yes, and they’re arguably the fastest-growing category right now. Unlike a fixed script that repeats the same task, an AI agent can chain together multiple actions and often needs broader, more dynamic access to be useful. That makes securing agent identities a genuine priority rather than an afterthought, especially as more teams move agents from pilot projects into production workflows. 

Where should a company start if it hasn’t managed non-human identities before?  

Start with discovery. You need a clear, centralized inventory of every service account, token, and workload identity before anything else makes sense, including: 

• Scoping access appropriately 

• Assigning real ownership 

• Setting up behavioral monitoring 

Trying to fix permissions before you actually know what exists in your environment usually just creates more confusion than it resolves.