What is Non Human Identity provisioning and why is it broken?
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Non Human Identity Provisioning refers to the process of creating system and application accounts (the identities that enable system-to-system interactions). This includes generating the necessary credentials (unless operating in a federated environment) and assigning the appropriate access and permissions.
Ask most organizations how they provision non-human identities (NHIs), and you’ll likely get one of two answers: either there’s a ticket-based process involving slow manual steps, or there’s no real process at all, just developers or automation tools creating identities on the fly.
Both approaches are broken and they come at a cost. Broken provisioning leads to orphaned accounts, over-permissioned identities, and secrets that never rotate. These aren’t just operational nuisances; they’re active security risks that attackers increasingly exploit to move laterally, escalate privileges, or persist undetected in both on-prem and cloud environments.
The root of the issue? Provisioning is implemented as a one-time task, rather than a foundational control point in the identity lifecycle. This approach misses the opportunity to embed ownership, governance, and policy from day one and sets the stage for a host of downstream problems:
- Operational complexity due to lack of standardized process across systems, teams, or identity types
- Long MTTR of issues due to lack a designated owner
- Static credentials that persist for years without rotation
- Unknown usage information on what an NHI accesses or whether it’s still needed
This challenge is only going to get worse with the rise of AI workloads and agentic architectures, where autonomous agents and orchestration frameworks dynamically generate, deploy, and interconnect services, each requiring their own credentials or federated identities. These systems spin up NHIs at unprecedented scale and speed, often outside the visibility of IAM teams. Without provisioning and policy-based automated governance, AI becomes the perfect storm of untracked, ungoverned, and over-privileged NHIs .
Instead of being grounded in security policy (e.g., “All production NHIs must use short-lived federated credentials”), provisioning tends to follow tribal knowledge or copy-pasted patterns. Shortcuts made during development often get deployed into production — and never revisited.
As environments scale, this lack of policy alignment becomes a critical gap that opens up a wide range of risks. Here are a few common scenarios: :
- developer creates an API key for a new integration and shares it via Slack
- A temporary token used in testing ends up in a production script
- A service account has admin privileges “just in case,” but actually needed significantly less permissions
- A secret is transferred to the developer and then never rotated, to avoid disrupting operations.
- Ownership of an automation pipeline shifts, but no one decommissions the identity
What does NHI Provisioning look like today?
In many organizations, provisioning non-human identities follows a manual or semi-automated workflow. It often involves:
- Submitting a ticket to request a new identity
- Manual approvals from security or IAM teams
- Chasing down missing context or metadata through Teams, Slack or email
- Manually generating credentials
- Storing those credentials in a vault (if one is even used)
- Handing over access via email, Slack, or a shared document
- Logging updates in a CMDB or internal system
This process is often spread across multiple teams and relies heavily on human coordination.Even in cloud-native environments, typically involves a manual or semi-automated flow with tickets, handoffs, and unstructured coordination. The diagram below shows a very common scenario of the provisioning process of an Azure Service Principal
Why manual provisioning is not enough anymore
Provisioning NHIs manually might work for a handful of systems. But once you're managing hundreds or thousands across multiple cloud providers, it's simply not sustainable.
Manual processes are:
- Slow: Developers wait days for access, or worse, bypass the process altogether.
- Inconsistent: Policies are applied unevenly across teams and environments.
- Hard to scale: Every new environment or use case adds more overhead.
- Error-prone: Human error, copy-paste credentials, and unclear accountability introduce security gaps.
Even semi-automated approaches like Terraform modules, homegrown scripts or tagging policies often fall short. They still require discipline, manual reviews, and don’t enforce true governance at scale.
The Risks of Ungoverned Automation Sprawl
On the flip side, uncontrolled automation at the periphery—often driven by developers or teams seeking to bypass slow manual processes—creates its own set of problems. Without centralized governance, automation leads to:
- Untracked Identities: NHIs created outside of formal processes are often undocumented, making it impossible to track their purpose, ownership, or permissions.
- Over-Privileged Access: Automated scripts may grant excessive permissions by default, increasing the attack surface.
- Abandoned Identities: NHIs created for temporary or one-off purposes are often left active, becoming potential vulnerabilities.
- Credential Proliferation: Automated tools may generate and distribute credentials without proper rotation or vaulting, leading to unsecured secrets.
This sprawl of ungoverned NHIs is particularly insidious because it often goes unnoticed until a security incident occurs.
What’s Next
Non-Human Identity Provisioning isn’t just an operational task—it’s a security priority. As the number of NHIs continues to grow, organizations must address both the inefficiencies of manual processes and the risks of uncontrolled automation. A robust NHI provisioning strategy should:
- Automate with Governance: Streamline provisioning with automated workflows that enforce policies, assign ownership, and ensure least-privileged access.
- Centralize Oversight: Provide visibility into all NHIs, regardless of how they’re created, to prevent sprawl and ensure accountability.
- Integrate Security: Embed credential rotation, vaulting, and monitoring into the provisioning process to minimize risks.
- Scale Efficiently: Support the growing volume of NHIs across hybrid and multi-cloud environments without adding overhead.
We believe the provisioning gap can be closed, and we’re working on solutions to make that happen. Stay tuned for more.
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