The State of Non-Human Identity (NHI) Management

As digital ecosystems grow increasingly complex, so too do the identities operating within them. No longer confined to human users, identity and access management (IAM) strategies must now account for a rapidly growing, often invisible population, non-human identities (NHIs). These include service accounts, workloads, bots, APIs, containers, IoT devices, machine learning pipelines, and autonomous agents.

In this analysis, I evaluate the approaches taken by emerging NHI-focused vendors, Astrix, Entro, Natoma, Oasis Security, P0 Security, Token Security, and Veza, and ask the forward-facing question: Is purpose-built NHI software now a critical necessity, or can traditional PAM and IGA platforms still rise to the occasion?

Vendor Comparative Overview

Analysis Across Key Dimensions

1. Discovery and Visibility

NHI sprawl is invisible by design, often created automatically by pipelines, tools, or as ephemeral containers. Vendors like Natoma and Oasis shine here, offering automated discovery of service accounts, workloads, and their permissions. Astrix also brings visibility into third-party SaaS connections, filling a blind spot traditional PAM tools ignore.

2. Governance and Policy Enforcement

Oasis and P0 Security stand out by providing centralized governance and policy-as-code capabilities, critical as organizations adopt GitOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) models. Veza contributes strong authorization graphing but is still catching up on NHI-specific enforcement.

3. Secrets and Credential Lifecycle Management

Entro and Token Security lead the pack in this dimension. Entro's ability to contextualize secrets across the SDLC, including stale or overprivileged keys, is unmatched. Token Security, while narrower in focus, provides robust management of API tokens, an oft-ignored attack vector.

4. Integration and Ecosystem Fit

Veza and Astrix have the edge. With existing integrations across SaaS platforms and access intelligence ecosystems, they are easier to pilot in multi-cloud environments. However, vendors like Natoma and P0 may require more upfront engineering effort.

The Case for Purpose-Built NHI Platforms

The IAM space has historically retrofitted existing PAM/IGA tools to handle machine identities. But that era is ending, what worked for shared human admin accounts cannot scale to Kubernetes service accounts spun up and down every 5 minutes or ephemeral OAuth tokens passed between ML inference engines.

Why traditional platforms fall short:

- Temporal Identity Explosion: Legacy systems assume long-lived identities. NHIs often live minutes, sometimes seconds.

- Lack of Contextual Awareness: Human identity governance is tied to roles. Machine identities are dynamic and contextual, often permissioned based on code commit, workload type, or data sensitivity.

- Unscalable Secrets Management: Vaults like HashiCorp Vault work well for static secrets, but when secrets are dynamically generated and expired within seconds, lifecycle automation becomes critical.

Purpose-built NHI software offers:

- Continuous discovery of short-lived identities across cloud-native infrastructure

- Real-time risk scoring and automated least privilege enforcement

- Governance frameworks tailored to DevOps and ML/Ops workflows

- Policy-as-code that integrates with CI/CD pipelines

Strategic Recommendations

- CISOs and IAM leaders must adopt an identity-first security model that explicitly includes machine identities as first-class citizens.

- PAM and IGA leaders should evaluate vendors like Oasis and Natoma not as replacements, but as essential complements to human identity governance.

- DevOps and Platform teams should pilot solutions like Entro or P0 Security where NHI proliferation is slowing pipeline velocity or increasing breach risk.

- Boards and Compliance Executives should mandate visibility and lifecycle control for all NHIs as part of annual risk audits.

The Future is Non-Human

The arc of digital transformation bends toward automation. And automation is identity. As AI agents, containerized microservices, and distributed compute take center stage, organizations must abandon the illusion that traditional IAM can stretch far enough to govern this new frontier.

NHI software is no longer a "nice to have" - it is an inevitability. IGA vendors will have to innovate to add key NHI features while NHI vendors should be expanding their human IGA capabilities. As I have said before, IGA will become ubiquitous across all identity platforms.

And those that fail to invest in purpose-built solutions today may find themselves not merely out of compliance but out maneuvered by attackers who understand that the weakest identity in your environment is the one no human remembers creating.