An offboarded employee refers to a former staff member whose employment has formally ended and whose user access to enterprise systems has been, or should be, revoked. In the context of identity and access management (IAM), offboarding typically involves deactivating user accounts, removing entitlements, and revoking device and application access. However, in modern cloud and DevOps environments, offboarding must also address non-human identities (NHIs)—such as service accounts, API keys, and machine credentials—that the former employee created, owned, or managed during their tenure.
Failing to fully decommission both human and associated non-human identities during offboarding introduces significant security risk. Orphaned NHIs—those that remain active after a creator or owner departs—can serve as persistent, unmonitored backdoors into production systems. These identities often retain high privileges and lack visibility in traditional IAM tools, making them prime targets for exploitation. According to industry data, 68% of organizations have active machine credentials tied to offboarded personnel, with attacker dwell times exceeding 280 days due to inadequate credential lifecycle management.
In practice, offboarding must extend beyond deactivating human accounts to include:
NHIs often outlive their human counterparts due to poor attribution and lack of automation in offboarding workflows. In DevOps environments, former employees may leave behind long-lived access tokens, hardcoded secrets in CI/CD pipelines, or overprivileged service accounts. Without centralized visibility and lifecycle enforcement, these machine identities remain active and unmonitored. Mapping NHIs back to their human owners is essential to ensuring their proper decommissioning during offboarding.
Yes. Studies show that NHIs proliferate up to 17 times faster than human identities, and 67% of service accounts lack documented ownership. Incidents such as SolarWinds and Dropbox demonstrate how improperly offboarded NHIs can lead to major breaches. Emerging best practices include integrating HR systems with NHI security platforms, adopting just-in-time access controls, and implementing zero-trust mechanisms for machine identities, such as SPIFFE/SPIRE and short-lived certificates.
As enterprise environments become more automated and distributed, the offboarding process must evolve to include machine identity governance. Organizations that implement NHI-aware offboarding pipelines—integrating HR, IAM, and DevOps systems—significantly reduce their attack surface, improve compliance posture, and accelerate breach containment. In a world where machine identities increasingly outnumber humans, offboarding must be redefined as a cross-domain lifecycle management process that secures both people and the digital constructs they leave behind.
