Why Managing Non-Human Identities (NHIs) Must Be a Central Concern for Identity Access Management
RTInsights, Friday, August 29th, 2025
As NHIs become the dominant population in enterprise environments, organizations must evolve their IAM strategies to keep up. That evolution starts with expanding the definition of identity to match the autonomous operations of many systems today.
At this year's RSA Conference, non-human identities (NHIs) emerged as one of the most urgent and fastest-growing challenges in security. In some cases, these digital entities now outnumber human users by a factor of 50:1, an exponential imbalance that is only increasing as organizations scale up their integration of automation and agentic AI.
While they may not be widely known, the security risks posed by NHIs are nothing new. Improper management of non-human access has prompted several recent cyberattacks and breaches, including ones impacting Cloudflare and the U.S. Treasury Network. These incidents involved compromised or misused non-human credentials, including under protected API Keys, misconfigured workloads, and poorly managed service accounts, giving attackers persistent yet quiet access to critical and sensitive systems.