Digital identities are the backbone of modern IT infrastructure. Most security frameworks are built to manage people, such as authenticating users, limiting access, and enforcing zero-trust. But in today’s threat landscape, humans are just one piece of the puzzle. The real risk lives in the shadows: unmanaged identities, machine-to-machine connections, and systems that never sleep.
Non-human identities (NHIs) are your silent workforce.
“With NHIs outnumbering human identities by potentially more than 50 to one,” (451 Research), diverse NHIs now form a vast ecosystem including APIs, services, AI agents, bots, and containers that power your automations, integrate your systems, and move your data. But unlike humans, they’re often left unseen, unmanaged, and overprivileged.
Security teams have spent years guarding against insider threats and phishing attacks. Rightly so. But now it’s time to apply that same scrutiny to the non-human identities working behind the scenes.
Proper understanding and management of non-human identities unlocks stronger security, smarter compliance, and tighter control across your digital environment.
Because trust shouldn’t be assumed, even for the employees you didn’t hire.
What are non-human identities?
Non-human identities (NHIs) are digital credentials that enable machines, apps, cloud workloads, and services to prove who they are and what they’re allowed to do. Think API keys, OAuth tokens, machine identities, and service accounts.
Unlike human users, NHIs handle machine-to-machine connections that drive automated workflows behind the scenes. They’re essential for keeping modern IT, cloud, SaaS, and DevOps environments running smoothly. Keeping tabs on these identities is just as critical as managing your people.
Why do NHIs matter?
Because they’re multiplying fast and flying under the radar, many with elevated privileges and zero oversight. That’s not just technical debt. It’s a sprawling, unmanaged attack surface.
The different types (and examples) of non-human identities
Non-human identities (NHIs) come in all shapes and sizes. Here’s a breakdown of the most common types you’ll find powering today’s digital ecosystem:
- OAuth apps and delegated tokens: Third-party or custom apps granted scoped access to your SaaS data (e.g., Google Workspace add-ons, Salesforce connected apps, Microsoft Entra app registrations).
- API keys and personal access tokens: Static secrets used by scripts and integrations to call SaaS APIs (e.g., Slack bot tokens, GitHub PATs, Notion/Jira API keys).
- Service accounts and service principals: Non-person accounts with persistent permissions inside SaaS tenants to run automations and integrations (e.g., Salesforce “integration user,” Google service accounts, Entra service principals).
- Automation and workflow bots: Bots and iPaaS connectors that read/write data and trigger actions across apps (e.g., Slack/Teams bots, Zapier, Workato).
- AI copilots and agentic tools: Built-in or custom AI agents that access content and perform actions via plugins and APIs (e.g., Microsoft 365 Copilot, Salesforce Einstein, internal LLM agents).
- SCIM/provisioning connectors: Identity platform connectors that create, update, and deprovision users and groups across SaaS apps (e.g., Okta or Entra ID SCIM).
- Webhooks and inbound endpoints: URLs that receive events from one app to trigger actions in another (e.g., GitHub or Stripe webhooks into CI/CD or CRM).
- CI/CD and dev tooling tokens: Pipeline and build tokens that interact with SaaS repos, issue trackers, and registries (e.g., GitHub Actions/GitLab CI to Jira and package registries).
Treat non-human identities as first-class accounts. Strong SaaS security means you can answer what NHIs exist, who owns them, what scopes and data they touch, how long they live, and where they connect. Done well, NHI governance limits data exposure and keeps pace with the growth of AI agents and automation across your SaaS ecosystem.
Vorlon discovers OAuth apps, tokens, service accounts, and AI agents across your SaaS estate, mapping scopes and data flows, flagging over-privilege and stale secrets, monitoring behavior, and automating least‑privilege actions such as scope reduction, token rotation or revocation, and session termination. Plus, it integrates with your SIEM/SOAR/ITSM for audit-ready governance at scale.
The different use cases of non-human identities
Non-human identities (NHIs) power automation, integration, and security across your digital landscape. Here’s where you’ll find them in action:
Third-party integrations: Whenever the third-party SaaS app you use needs to connect to your systems, it’s an NHI that handles the handshake. These identities keep data flowing securely between your systems and the outside world.
Internal service-to-service comms: Developers build modern apps from dozens of microservices. NHIs make sure each service can talk to the others securely and with the right permissions, without a human in the loop.
Automated processes: Backups, data processing, nightly reports: if it runs on a schedule or triggers automatically, chances are it’s using an NHI to log in, fetch data, or push results where they’re needed.
DevOps pipelines: CI/CD is all about speed and automation. NHIs lets your build, test, and deployment tools talk to each other, move code, and spin up environments with no manual intervention required.
What is the difference between non-human identity and machine identity?
People often use the terms “non-human identities” (NHIs) and “machine identities” interchangeably, but they're not the same. Think of it like this: all machine identities are non-human, but not all non-human identities are machines.
According to Gartner®, its "taxonomy divides the realm of IAM into different entities. The ‘machine’ realm can be divided into physical machines, such as devices, and workloads such as virtual machines, containers, and applications."1
The research publication provided further clarification, stating that "NHI encompasses any identity that is not human. Examples include devices and software, as well as organizational legal entities and even animals."
Let’s break it down:
- Non-human identities are any software or service actors not tied to a person. In SaaS, this means OAuth apps and tokens, API keys, service accounts, automation bots, webhooks, SCIM connectors, and AI agents that request access and perform actions without human interaction.
- Machine identities are a subset of NHIs that represent devices and workloads. They authenticate physical or virtual machines and services so they can securely connect and communicate.
So, what’s the core difference?
- NHIs manage software and service-based access.
- Machine identities manage device-level access.
They overlap conceptually, but they operate at different layers. For SaaS security, the practical focus is on the software and service NHIs that live in your tenants and integrations, not on endpoint or device identities. Prioritize discovery, ownership, least privilege, expirations, rotation, and activity monitoring for those SaaS NHIs.
CASB and SSE: Limited Use for NHI Access Management
CASB and Security Service Edge (SSE) are often the first tools considered for cloud security. They excel at discovering shadow IT, enforcing DLP, and delivering zero‑trust access for users, but they’re built around user traffic and the network path. For SaaS tenants, effective protection requires knowing what each solves, where they fall short, especially for non‑human access, and how to pair them with controls that operate inside SaaS apps via APIs.
CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker)
CASB sits between users and cloud apps via proxy and/or API mode. It discovers shadow IT, applies access and DLP policies to user sessions, and provides visibility into how sanctioned SaaS is used. Where it’s limited is inside the apps themselves. CASB focuses on human traffic and data in motion, so it has only partial visibility into app-to-app and API-to-API activity.
SSE (Security Service Edge)
SSE delivers security from the cloud, usually combining secure web gateway (SWG), zero trust network access (ZTNA), CASB, and cloud DLP. Integrated with your identity provider (IdP), it enforces context-aware, least-privilege access and gives distributed users fast, secure connectivity. Its limits mirror CASB’s in SaaS: SSE secures user and device traffic at the edge, but most software-based actors authenticate directly to public SaaS APIs and bypass those controls.
CASB and SSE are valuable for governing human access and data-in-motion policies, but they play a limited role in securing what matters most for SaaS security: SaaS configurations, non-human access, and cross-app data flows.
How do non-human identities work and operate?
NHIs operate behind the scenes, triggering workflows, communicating with APIs, transferring data, and executing tasks that keep your SaaS ecosystem running smoothly. They’re tireless, fast, and often invisible, which makes understanding how they operate essential to securing them.
Here’s a breakdown of how they function:
Authentication
Before doing anything, an NHI needs to prove it belongs. This is usually done through API tokens, digital certificates, or OAuth credentials, not usernames and passwords. The credentials authenticate their identity to the service they want to access.
Once authenticated, the NHI must be told what it’s allowed to do. This is handled through assigned roles or permissions. Unlike human role-based access control (RBAC) models, NHI access often runs leaner, but mistakes here can mean wide-open data paths with no human oversight.
Task execution
This is where the real work happens. NHIs execute tasks, such as transferring data, launching workflows, or synchronizing systems automatically, repeatedly, and at scale. They’re the gears in the SaaS machine.
Continuous operation
NHIs don’t take breaks. They operate 24/7, pushing requests and moving data whether you're in the office or not. That’s great for uptime, but it also means misconfigurations can cause significant damage quickly.
Lifecycle management
Like humans, NHIs require management from creation to deactivation. If you don’t retire an unused token or role, you leave access open with no oversight. That’s a recipe for risk.
Monitoring and auditing
Every action an NHI takes should be logged, monitored, and reviewable. Why? Because they often have high privileges, and if something goes wrong, you need to detect and respond fast.
Non-human identities are everywhere: in your cloud apps, CI/CD pipelines, IoT networks, and SaaS integrations. They drive efficiency. But they also expand your attack surface if left unmanaged.
What is non-human identity management?
Non-human identity management (NHIM) is a practical way to discover, secure, and govern software-based identities that act without a person present. The goal is to inventory them, control what they can access, and manage their lifecycle from creation through rotation to retirement. This matters because these identities now drive much of your automation and integration, and they are increasingly targeted in attacks.
NHIM focuses on system-to-system access and automation rather than human logins.
It’s about:
- Managing credentials securely
- Granting only the access needed
- Rotating secrets regularly
- Monitoring for drift or misuse
- Deactivating identities when they’re no longer in use
NHIM provides structure and accountability for software-based access. It reduces risk and improves auditability, but it needs to work alongside broader SaaS security controls to be effective.
The security challenges, risks, and vulnerabilities of non-human identities
Non-human identities (NHIs) are essential to the way modern IT operates. They power automation, enable integrations, and run silently in the background. But here’s the problem: they’re growing fast, and most environments aren't built to manage them securely.
NHI is often an overlooked part of IAM, and many organizations lack formal routines for offboarding, revoking, and rotating API keys.
Here’s what you’re up against:
- Volume and complexity: Thousands of NHIs. Dozens more are created daily. Without central visibility, managing them becomes a guessing game, and the sprawl becomes a security risk.
- Overprivileged access: Due to the challenges in managing large volumes of NHIs, these entities often have overly broad or privileged access rights, making them attractive targets for cybercriminals.
- No visibility, no management: Unlike human users, NHIs are created and destroyed without ceremony. No tickets. No onboarding. Often, no offboarding either. Therefore, ghost accounts linger, which are unwatched and unaccounted for.
- Minimal monitoring: System administrators do not typically monitor most NHIs. No logs. No alerts. No context. Hence, if one gets compromised, it’s often invisible until the damage is done.
- Weak authentication: NHIs often use shared and hardcoded credentials, which are difficult to change or manage consistently. These weak credentials increase the risk of unauthorized access or misuse.
- Credential theft: When a threat actor steals an NHI credential, they not only gain access but also inherit its full range of permissions. And because NHIs are often trusted implicitly, that access can go undetected for days or weeks.
- Supply chain exposure: In modern environments, NHIs link external vendors, tools, and APIs. If one of those gets compromised, so does your system. This is how supply chain attacks quietly escalate.
- Compliance complications: Most regulatory frameworks assume clear user accountability. NHIs blur that line. Without proper tracking and control, proving who (or what) accessed sensitive data becomes a nightmare.
Bottom Line:
Non-human identities are multiplying constantly, and if you don't govern them, they introduce risk and become a threat surface of their own.
So, you need:
- Centralized management
- Granular, least-privilege access
- Real-time monitoring
- Automated lifecycle control
Because the systems you trust to run your business shouldn’t be the ones that bring it down.
The best practices for managing non-human identities
Non-human identities (NHIs) don’t ask for permission. So, you need to manage them with precision. Here’s how to stay ahead:
- Identity governance: Define who can create, control, and retire NHIs, and enforce them. Without guardrails, you’re just stacking risk.
- Least privilege access: Grant only the minimum access necessary and no more. The broader the permissions, the bigger the blast radius.
- Lifecycle management: Track every NHI from creation to decommissioning. If it’s no longer in use, shut it down. Stale identities are silent vulnerabilities.
- Regular auditing: Review and audit all NHIs on a rolling basis. Clear out what’s dormant. Investigate what’s over permissioned.
- Secure credential management: No hardcoded credentials. No shared secrets. Use encrypted storage, rotate keys often, and manage access via a credential vault or key management system (KMS).
- Real-time monitoring: Watch what your NHIs are doing in your environment. Set alerts for abnormal behavior, unauthorized permission changes, or usage spikes.
- IAM integration: Integrate NHI oversight into your existing identity and access management tools. One view. One system. No blind spots.
- Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) where it counts: Yes, even for machine access. For critical systems, enable multi-factor authentication for non-human actors where supported.
- Train the humans: Train all employees, especially those in developer and operations roles, about the security risks associated with NHIs and how to manage them effectively.
- Automated compliance: Use automation to enforce policy, log access, and prove compliance. Manual processes won’t scale, and attackers know it.
Unmanaged non-human identities create risk. Managing them well is a key aspect of business continuity.
Why do most enterprises struggle to manage non-human identities?
Managing NHIs is a fast-paced, high-risk challenge that most enterprises struggle to handle. Here’s why:
- Lack of visibility: NHIs are everywhere, spinning up across cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, and SaaS tools. However, most organizations don't even know how many they have, let alone their location or what they can access.
- Complexity at scale: From service accounts to API tokens to IoT devices, NHIs come in all shapes, and none of them behave like human users. Each has unique lifecycles, permissions, and operational roles that don’t fit into traditional identity playbooks.
- Over-privileged by default: In the name of “just make it work,” NHIs are often granted broad, persistent access. That’s convenient for automation, but it’s dangerous when misused or compromised.
- Poor access controls: Human and non-human identities operate differently. NHIs often need sensitive, system-level access, yet many organizations apply the same rules to both, missing the nuance and introducing risk.
- No behavior to track: NHIs can’t use MFA. They don’t click links. They don’t call the help desk. That means you can’t rely on human-centric security controls to detect when something’s off.
- Compliance strain: Auditors want to know who accessed what and when. NHIs complicate that audit trail. Without automated governance, proving compliance becomes a time sink or, worse, a liability.
- The wrong tools: Security engineers build most IAM systems for people. NHIs need tools that track keys, enforce expiration, and automate cleanup, not just provision logins.
- Rapid change: In fast-moving environments, NHIs are constantly created and destroyed. Keeping up manually? Impossible. Without automation and visibility, they pile up fast and go unmanaged even faster.
How does Vorlon help enterprises manage non-human identities and secure their SaaS ecosystems?
Your SaaS environment is only as secure as the identities running it, and not all of them are human. Non-human identities (NHIs) power automation, connect APIs, and keep your systems in motion. But when they’re left unmanaged, they become invisible vulnerabilities.
Here’s how Vorlon helps you bring them into view and under control:
Unified inventory
Vorlon provides a real-time, centralized view of every non-human identity in your SaaS stack, including API keys, service accounts, bots, machine identities, and more.
AI security
AI copilots and automations run on non-human access and inherit whatever scopes their tokens and service identities have. Vorlon discovers and inventories these tools, maps privileges and data flows, applies SaaS‑aware DLP to prompts and outputs, monitors agent actions, and enables rapid containment with token revocation and kill switches through your existing SIEM/SOAR/ITSM.
Identity lifecycle management
From creation to decommissioning, Vorlon automates the entire lifecycle of NHIs, ensuring that unused identities don’t linger and high-privilege accounts aren’t left active beyond their intended purpose.
It provides a safety valve, a break-the-glass moment that’s pivotal in helping identity threat detection and response to stop identity-based attacks. Vorlon is built to investigate, interrogate, and shut down attacks in real time. Stopping threats is as fast and intuitive as two clicks.
Fig. 1–Emergency revoke access in the Vorlon platform
Secure authentication and access
We enforce token-based, certificate-backed, and key-based authentication with role-aware authorization. No default access. No overreach. Just precise, policy-driven control built for automation at scale.
Continuous monitoring and compliance
With real-time activity monitoring, Vorlon spots unusual NHI behavior the moment it happens. We map it back to compliance frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2, ensuring you're always audit-ready.
Risk prioritization
This is where the rubber meets the road. You need context to prioritize what matters most. Not every identity poses the same threat. Vorlon analyzes real-time data flows between applications to score and surface risk based on access levels, usage patterns, and exposure, so you know where to act first.
Seamless SaaS integration
Vorlon connects directly with your SaaS apps and security platforms, automating NHI discovery and governance across every environment. One standard. Full control.
Reach out
Non-human identities are scaling faster than human users. Vorlon helps you govern them all, without slowing down the systems they support.
Want to know how many non-human identities are operating in your SaaS environment right now? We’ll show you.
1Gartner Research — Quick Answer: What Is the Difference Between Machine IAM and Nonhuman Identity? 17 February 2025. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Lauren Lee
Sales Engineer at Vorlon
Lauren Lee is a Sales Engineer at Vorlon with eight years of cybersecurity experience. Before Vorlon, she held a variety of vendor and client-side technical cybersecurity positions, including roles at Palo Alto Networks, Cylance, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and a major financial institution. Lauren graduated from the University of Southern California with a B.A. in Cognitive Science and a minor in Computer and Digital Forensics. She is dedicated to applying her security practitioner insights to assist Fortune 500 companies in overcoming common SOC team challenges, such as alert fatigue. Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn to stay updated on her latest professional insights.
