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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
So, what’s the core difference?
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 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
Because the systems you trust to run your business shouldn’t be the ones that bring it down.
Non-human identities (NHIs) don’t ask for permission. So, you need to manage them with precision. Here’s how to stay ahead:
Unmanaged non-human identities create risk. Managing them well is a key aspect of business continuity.
Managing NHIs is a fast-paced, high-risk challenge that most enterprises struggle to handle. Here’s why:
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:
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Vorlon connects directly with your SaaS apps and security platforms, automating NHI discovery and governance across every environment. One standard. Full control.
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.
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.