Non-human identities (NHIs) are rapidly expanding across your systems. These digital identities access resources, execute tasks, and communicate with other systems — often with little or no human involvement.
You’ll find NHIs across infrastructure, applications, integrations, cloud platforms, automation environments, security systems, and network systems. They drive efficiency, accuracy, and productivity — but they also introduce new risks.
As NHIs evolve into fully agentic identities, they no longer just execute predefined tasks. They make decisions, adapt to context, and chain actions together in real time. This makes their behavior less predictable, meaning the actions they take can extend beyond what was originally intended when permissions were granted.
At the same time, AI and automation are driving rapid identity sprawl, with as many as 144 NHIs for every human identity. This combination of unpredictable behavior and exponential growth makes it significantly harder to maintain control, creating major challenges for how you design your Privileged Access Management (PAM) strategy.
A modern approach that governs every type of identity strengthens not just security, but overall business performance. Here are six reasons why it’s now essential.
1: Support expanded, machine-speed environments
The scale of identity sprawl driven by NHIs is significant and constantly increasing. This includes:
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Fast, unpredictable identity creation: AI workloads, microservices, automated scripts, and self-replicating processes
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Privileged API tokens: API keys, OAuth tokens, SSH keys, and hard-to-rotate secrets
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Ephemeral workloads: serverless functions, Kubernetes, and AI nodes
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Shadow AI: unsanctioned or independently deployed AI creating identities and access paths outside standard monitoring and control
This rapid growth increases your attack surface, enabling lateral movement and persistent access risks — especially when monitoring and multi-factor authentication (MFA) are weak.
At the same time, many organizations overestimate their readiness. While 87% believe their identity security posture can handle AI-driven automation at scale, 46% report weak governance around AI systems. As identities become more autonomous, governance gaps become more pronounced.
2: Eliminate the shortcomings of human-centric PAM
Legacy PAM models were designed for human users, not machine identities. They assume static accounts, lack integration with modern pipelines, and focus primarily on human administrators.
This creates technical debt, expands your attack surface, and leaves open vulnerable entry points for lateral movement.
A modern approach secures both human and machine-driven identities through automation-first architecture, dynamic secrets management, and continuous monitoring. The result is stronger visibility, tighter control, reduced risk, and seamless integration across DevOps, cloud, AI, and automation environments.
3: Enable stronger, modern security controls
A modern PAM strategy supports a long-term shift toward continuous authorization and Zero Standing Privilege. This ensures that AI agents and NHIs are governed with the same rigor as human identities, with full auditability of every privileged action.
The result is a measurable improvement in your security posture — real-time, context-aware governance, reduced standing access, and tighter control over privileged activity.
By moving from session-based to action-level authorization, and treating all access as ephemeral by default, your organization is prepared for both current and emerging AI-driven identity models.
4: Strengthen and prove compliance
Regulatory requirements increasingly extend to machine identities, making PAM a critical focus for auditors and regulators.
A modern approach demonstrates clear control by replacing manual processes and static credentials with automated, policy-driven enforcement. For example:
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NIST 800-53: enforcing least privilege, automated credential rotation, and continuous monitoring
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SOX: delivering on-demand, auditable, and enforceable controls, including segregation of duties (SoD) across machine-driven actions
This positions you to meet compliance requirements more efficiently — and with greater confidence.
5: Deliver measurable business value
Managing PAM manually introduces significant operational overhead. Credential rotation, session monitoring, onboarding, infrastructure management, ticket handling, and compliance reporting all consume time and resources.
Consider a request for domain admin access. In a traditional model, this process can take up to a week due to approvals, provisioning, and password rotation. With automation, it can be completed in minutes.
This shift reduces costs, improves efficiency, and minimizes risk. A Business Value Assessment helps quantify these gains, giving you a clear case for investment, not just for security leaders, but for the broader C-suite.
6: Gain competitive advantage through automation
When aligned with automation, PAM becomes a strategic enabler, not just a security control.
By securing all identities — human and machine — you improve resilience, reduce administrative burden, and remove barriers to adoption for new technologies. This allows you to move faster, adopt AI with confidence, and maintain strong security without slowing innovation.
In summary: approaching a modernized PAM strategy
To modernize your PAM approach, you need a structured, repeatable framework for managing NHIs across DevOps, cloud, automation, and AI-driven environments, which includes:
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Inventory and discovery: establish visibility across all NHIs, identify embedded credentials, and centralize identity data
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Risk categorization: map identities to business services, prioritize high-risk credentials, and apply tiered controls
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Governance and controls: apply automated, integrated PAM controls at scale, with rotation policies, clear ownership, and policy-driven workflows
Success depends on more than implementation. You need a clear understanding of both the risks and the opportunities involved in managing human and machine identities together.
Learn more by watching our on-demand webinar with fellow experts from Delinea and see how you can strengthen identity governance in the agentic AI era.
FAQ’s
1. What are non-human identities (NHIs), and why are they increasing so rapidly?
Non-human identities (NHIs) are digital identities used by applications, services, APIs, automation tools, and AI systems to interact with other systems and access resources.
Their growth is being driven by cloud adoption, DevOps practices, and AI-driven automation, all of which rely on machine-to-machine communication. As a result, organizations now manage significantly more NHIs than human identities, often at a ratio exceeding 100 to 1.
2. Why do agentic NHIs create new security challenges for PAM?
As NHIs become more advanced, they move beyond executing predefined tasks and begin making decisions and taking actions independently.
This makes their behavior less predictable, meaning the actions they perform can extend beyond what was originally intended when permissions were granted. Traditional Privileged Access Management (PAM) approaches are not designed for this level of autonomy, making it harder to enforce least privilege, maintain visibility, and control risk.
3. How does modern PAM help manage machine identities at scale?
Modern PAM is designed to secure both human and machine identities in dynamic, automated environments. It replaces static credentials and manual processes with capabilities like automated credential rotation, real-time monitoring, and policy-based access controls.
This allows organizations to maintain visibility, enforce least privilege, and scale governance effectively, even as the number and complexity of NHIs continue to grow.
