Modern IT environments have crossed a tipping point — non-human identities now vastly outnumber the humans they serve. Understanding why they're harder to manage, and how Delinea addresses them, is critical to any modern PAM strategy.
Non-human identities (NHIs) are any digital entity that authenticates and accesses resources without direct human operation. They span a wide spectrum — from a simple API key to a fully autonomous cloud workload.
Human identity management has decades of process refinement — joiner/mover/leaver workflows, HR-driven provisioning, regular access reviews. Non-human identities operate outside all of these guardrails.
| Dimension | Human Identities | Non-Human Identities |
|---|---|---|
| Offboarding Trigger | 🟢 HR termination event | 🔴 None — persists until manually removed |
| Ownership Clarity | 🟢 Named employee, manager chain | 🔴 Often undocumented or orphaned |
| Privilege Level | 🟡 Regularly reviewed, right-sized | 🔴 Frequently over-privileged for convenience |
| Credential Rotation | 🟡 Password policies enforce change | 🔴 Rarely rotated — risk of application breakage |
| MFA Capable | 🟢 Standard requirement | 🔴 Architecturally incompatible with most MFA |
| Audit Visibility | 🟢 Activity tied to a named person | 🔴 Shared credentials obscure accountability |
| Discovery | 🟢 HR system is authoritative source | 🔴 Scattered across AD, vaults, code repos, YAML files |
Drill into the three root causes of NHI risk:
When a developer leaves, their human account is deprovisioned. But the service account they created for a legacy integration, the API key they generated in a SaaS portal, and the pipeline secret they committed to a config file — those live on indefinitely.
Without an equivalent to an HR departure trigger, NHIs accumulate. A five-year-old organization may have thousands of service accounts that haven't been used in years, still holding broad permissions to production systems.
When a developer needs a service account for an integration, the path of least resistance is Domain Admin or a broad IAM policy. Scope creep is real — it's easier to grant too much access upfront than to iterate permissions until they break. The application ships, the account is forgotten.
Cloud environments compound this. IAM roles attached to Lambda functions or ECS tasks are often granted wildcard permissions like s3:* or iam:* during development and never tightened before reaching production.
Rotating a service account password or API key sounds simple — but in practice it requires knowing every application that uses that credential, coordinating updates across multiple systems, and accepting downtime risk. The result: credentials are set once and never touched.
Secrets hard-coded in application code, configuration files, or CI/CD pipelines are virtually never rotated because the rotation would require a code change, a build, and a deployment. Many organizations have production secrets that haven't changed in yearsA 2023 GitGuardian survey found that 50% of secrets detected in source code had been there for over a year, and 35% for more than 3 years..
Each stage of a non-human identity's lifecycle presents distinct security gaps. Click any node to understand the risk — and Delinea's response.
Delinea addresses non-human identity risk through two integrated pillars: Service Account Management within Secret Server and Secrets Management via the DevOps Secrets Vault (DSV) and integrated platform capabilities.
Secret Server provides a centralized, privileged repository for all service account credentials — passwords, tokens, and SSH keys. Rather than trusting developers to manage credentials in config files, it becomes the authoritative vault with policy-enforced rotation and access controls.
DSV replaces hard-coded secrets in code and CI/CD pipelines with dynamic secret retrieval at runtime — secrets never reside in source control or config files.
Delinea extends PAM to cloud-native environments — managing IAM roles, Azure Managed Identities, and GCP service accounts with the same governance applied to traditional service accounts.
These are the critical points to internalize and communicate when discussing NHI risks with customers and prospects.
NHIs outnumber humans 45:1 — any customer who says "we don't have that many privileged accounts" almost certainly hasn't looked at their NHI population.
No offboarding trigger = endless accumulation. Unlike humans, NHIs require an affirmative decision to remove. Without governance, they grow forever.
Fear of breakage paralyzes rotation. Delinea's dependent application mapping and simultaneous propagation is the specific answer to this specific objection.
Hard-coded secrets are the leading cause of cloud breach. DSV removes the temptation entirely by making secrets dynamically retrievable at runtime.
Audit trails break without identity attribution. Shared service account credentials mean you can't tell which application — or person — performed a privileged action.
JIT access applies to NHIs too. Service accounts don't need to exist permanently — Delinea can provision and deprovision them scoped to specific tasks or time windows.
Answer these questions to confirm your grasp of the NHI landscape and Delinea's approach. You need 4 of 5 to pass.