Non-human identities — service accounts, machine users, integration tokens — now outnumber human accounts in most organizations. They move data, run jobs, and glue systems together. They also expand your attack surface in ways that are hard to see until something breaks. The pain point is that these identities are everywhere and usually invisible. They live in scripts, CI/CD pipelines, server configs, and cloud functions. They get created fast, and rarely die. That’s a problem.
Every forgotten service account is a door left open. Many carry long-lived secrets with wide permissions. Some were set up years ago by people who left the company. Others belong to workloads you no longer run. If an attacker finds one, they bypass MFA, device checks, and human-centric security controls. Audit logs become harder to trace because these accounts act without human context. The risk compounds as more systems connect.
The traditional approach — spreadsheets, manual audits, occasional clean-up — does not work at scale. Cloud-native environments, microservices architectures, and automation pipelines generate thousands of non-human identities, each requiring secure handling. Engineers often find it quicker to over-provision permissions than risk a broken deployment. This speed-first habit adds silent vulnerabilities.