An IAM (Identity and Access Management) user is a digital identity within a cloud or enterprise system that is granted permissions to access resources, perform operations, or interact with services. Traditionally, IAM users were designed to represent human actors—employees, administrators, or contractors—who authenticate and operate within an organization’s IT environment. However, as cloud-native architectures and automation frameworks have evolved, IAM users are increasingly utilized to represent Non-Human Identities (NHIs), such as scripts, services, APIs, and machine workloads.
In major cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, and Azure, IAM users or their equivalents (e.g., service accounts or managed identities) serve as the foundation for securing and authorizing access to infrastructure and data. These entities can possess credentials—including access keys, OAuth tokens, or certificates—that allow them to operate autonomously across environments.
IAM users are critical to enforcing access controls, auditing activity, and enabling secure operations in both human and machine contexts. In the case of NHIs, IAM users often authenticate programmatically to access cloud services, databases, or internal APIs. Misconfigurations—such as overprivileged roles, hardcoded credentials, or insufficient monitoring—can expose sensitive data or enable lateral movement across systems. According to industry research, over 68% of cloud breaches involve compromised or mismanaged NHI credentials, many of which are tied to IAM users.
IAM users also play a central role in zero trust security models, where continuous verification of identity, context, and intent is essential. Without proper governance, IAM users can become persistent attack surfaces that evade traditional human-centric identity protections.
In practice, IAM users are used extensively in both human and non-human contexts. For example, a DevOps pipeline might rely on an IAM user or service account with scoped permissions to deploy infrastructure via Terraform. A backend service may authenticate using an IAM user to retrieve secrets from a vault or write logs to cloud storage. In Kubernetes environments, service accounts are often mapped to IAM roles to grant pods programmatic access to cloud APIs.
Organizations also create IAM users for third-party tools that need access to internal resources. Without strict controls, these users may retain broad permissions long after they are needed, creating “orphaned” or “shadow” identities that increase risk.
IAM users are one of the most common representations of NHIs in cloud environments. While originally intended for human interaction, they are now frequently assigned to services, workloads, and automation processes. In AWS, for instance, IAM users and roles are used to control machine identity access to S3 buckets, databases, or Lambda functions. In GCP, service accounts function as IAM users that authorize API calls and background jobs.
This dual-purpose use introduces complexity: NHIs often operate at scale, multiply rapidly, and require ephemeral or context-aware permissions. Yet IAM user constructs are often static and persistent, making them prone to overuse, misconfiguration, and exploitation if not managed carefully.
Yes. Enterprises today report a 45:1 ratio of NHIs to human identities, and most of these NHIs are tied to IAM users or similar constructs. Research shows that 22% of IAM users in cloud environments are orphaned, and 89% of them retain elevated privileges. Only a small percentage of organizations rotate NHI credentials regularly, and fewer still implement automated controls to enforce least privilege or detect anomalies in NHI behavior.
Industry standards like NIST SP 800-53 and frameworks like the Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Controls Matrix emphasize identity governance for both human and machine identities. The shift toward policy-as-code, ephemeral credentials, and behavioral analytics reflects the growing need for machine-native IAM models.
IAM users serve as a foundational layer in modern identity architectures, but their growing use for NHIs introduces both strategic opportunities and operational risks. Effective management of IAM users—especially those assigned to machine identities—requires automation, visibility, and strict enforcement of least privilege. Organizations that treat IAM users as dynamic, risk-bearing entities can better safeguard against credential misuse, meet regulatory requirements, and ensure secure cloud adoption at scale. As NHIs continue to proliferate, securing IAM users will be essential to maintaining trust and resilience in digital infrastructure.
