A non-human identity (NHI) is a digital identity assigned to a software-based entity, such as an application, service, workload, API, and AI agent, that needs to authenticate and access resources autonomously. It functions much like a user account but is designed for machines, not people.
How Non-Human Identities Work
In any modern enterprise, thousands of background components continuously talk to each other: microservices calling APIs, automation scripts triggering builds, or AI agents querying data sources.
Each of these machine-to-machine interactions requires authentication and authorization.
Non-human identities are implemented through mechanisms such as:
- Service accounts in cloud platforms (AWS IAM roles, GCP service accounts).
- Certificates and tokens for workloads or APIs.
- Attestation-based credentials that prove workload integrity at runtime.
- Workload identity providers that issue and rotate credentials automatically.
Unlike user identities, NHIs typically operate at scale, are short-lived, and are managed through automation rather than manual provisioning.
Why Non-Human Identities Matter
As organizations adopt cloud-native architectures, DevOps automation, and AI agents, the number of machine identities now exceeds human ones by orders of magnitude. Securing them is critical because:
- Every workload with access credentials becomes a potential attack vector.
- Compromised service accounts can lead to large-scale data breaches.
- Regulatory frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA) increasingly require visibility into machine-to-machine access.
Managing non-human identities properly ensures Zero Trust consistency across human and machine users, allowing enterprises to enforce the same governance and compliance standards everywhere.
Common Challenges
- Credential Sprawl: Many organizations rely on static keys, service accounts, or secrets stored in code or CI/CD pipelines. These credentials multiply quickly, are rarely rotated, and often outlive the workloads that created them, creating unmanaged risk.
- Lifecycle Automation: Provisioning, rotating, and decommissioning thousands of workload identities across environments is complex without automated tooling.
- Visibility Gaps: Traditional IAM systems focus on people, leaving limited insight into what workloads are accessing which resources.
- Policy Drift: In multi-cloud and hybrid setups, inconsistent role definitions and policies cause permission mismatches that are difficult to audit.
- Tool Fragmentation: Teams juggle separate systems, cloud IAM, secrets managers, vaults, without a unified control plane, leading to operational friction.
How Aembit Helps
Aembit provides a centralized identity and access platform purpose-built for non-human actors. It replaces static credentials with dynamic, policy-driven workload identities that integrate seamlessly across clouds, APIs, and AI systems.
With Aembit:
- Workloads authenticate through secretless, ephemeral credentials.
- Access is enforced via least-privilege, identity-aware policies.
- Security teams gain real-time visibility into all machine-to-machine access patterns.
- Organizations can unify governance for human and non-human identities under one Zero Trust framework.
Aembit transforms non-human identity management from an ad-hoc operational problem into a governed, observable security discipline.
Related Reading
FAQ
You Have Questions?
We Have Answers.
Are non-human identities the same as service accounts, API keys, or machine identities?
Not exactly. Service accounts, API keys, TLS certificates, and workload identities are implementations of non-human identities, but the NHI concept is broader. NHIs represent any digital identity that a machine uses to authenticate, regardless of how it’s issued or stored. Modern NHIs emphasize verifiable identity, short-lived credentials, and automated lifecycle management rather than static credentials.
How many non-human identities does a typical enterprise have?
Most organizations underestimate this number. Studies from cloud providers and security vendors show that machine identities outnumber human identities by 30–45:1 in cloud-native environments. Every microservice, CI/CD workflow, API client, container, serverless function, and AI agent typically creates its own identity footprint—often without centralized tracking.
What’s the difference between managing NHIs on-prem vs. in the cloud?
On-prem systems (like Active Directory) were designed for humans and long-lived servers, not ephemeral workloads. Cloud environments introduce short-lived functions, auto-scaling services, CI/CD jobs, and multi-cloud IAM constructs (AWS IAM roles, GCP service accounts, Azure managed identities). Managing NHIs in the cloud requires automation, federation, and identity-aware policy—not the manual provisioning and static secrets common on-prem.
How do organizations audit access when most activity comes from NHIs instead of humans?
Effective NHI auditing requires correlating each machine-initiated action (API call, database query, service request) to:
- a unique machine identity,
- the policy it was operating under,
- the credentials issued (and their lifespan), and
- the resource it accessed.
Traditional logs only show what happened. Modern NHI observability needs to show which workload acted, why it was allowed, and via which identity, enabling Zero Trust auditing across human and non-human actors.