Non-Human Identity Sprawl

Last Updated on June 29, 2026 by Arnav Sharma

Most security programs were built to protect people. Single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, privileged access management, and quarterly access reviews all assume an identity belongs to a human who logs in, takes actions, and eventually leaves the organisation. Non-human identity sprawl breaks every one of those assumptions. Across cloud and hybrid environments, non-human identities now outnumber human users by wide margins, and the gap is widening every quarter as automation, APIs, and AI agents multiply. This guide explains what non-human identity sprawl is, why it has become a top identity risk, and how security teams can regain visibility, governance, and control over machine identities at scale.

If you run automation, cloud services, or any system-to-system communication, you already have non-human identities in your environment. The question is whether you can see them, govern them, and revoke them when they are no longer needed.

What Is Non-Human Identity Sprawl?

Non-human identity sprawl is the uncontrolled accumulation of non-human identities (NHIs) and their credentials across an organisation, faster than security teams can inventory, govern, or retire them. An NHI is any digital identity not tied to a person: a service account, an API key, an OAuth token, a certificate, a workload identity, or an AI agent that authenticates to access data or resources without direct human involvement.

These digital identities are the automated workforce behind modern operations. They connect applications to databases, run scheduled jobs, power CI/CD pipelines, drive robotic process automation, and let cloud workloads call other cloud services. Each one needs a credential to prove who it is, and each credential is a potential access path for an attacker. In sprawling cloud environments, the volume of these digital identities for applications and services quickly overwhelms manual tracking, which is why teams struggle to centralize oversight.

Sprawl is what happens when creation outpaces governance. Every new application, integration, microservice, and pipeline adds identities to the estate, and most are created without security review or a plan for retirement. Over time the estate fills with orphaned service accounts, forgotten tokens, and stale certificates that still hold live access.

How Sprawl Differs From Normal Growth

Healthy growth is tracked. Sprawl is not. The difference comes down to four operational gaps:

• No central inventory. Each platform keeps its own identity store, so no single view shows every NHI across cloud, SaaS, and on-premises systems.
• No clear ownership. The developer who created a service account may not remember its purpose six months later, and may have left the organisation entirely.
• No lifecycle discipline. NHIs are created in minutes and forgotten for years. Projects end, applications get deprecated, and teams reorganise, but the associated credentials remain active.
• No consistent controls. Many NHIs rely on static, long-lived secrets that are never rotated, rarely monitored, and never subject to MFA.

The result is an expanding inventory of exploitable access paths that the organisation cannot fully account for. This is identity sprawl in its most dangerous form, because the identities are powerful, persistent, and largely invisible.

Why NHIs Outnumber Human Users

The numbers are stark. Research from Entro Security, summarised in a 2026 Cloud Security Alliance analysis, found that non-human identities outnumber human identities at a ratio of roughly 144 to 1 in cloud-native environments, up from 92 to 1 in the first half of 2024. Across all enterprise environments the average sits near 45 to 1. In one published case study, an audit of a Fortune 500 financial institution reportedly found more than 4.2 million non-human identities against approximately 50,000 human user accounts.

Several forces drive the imbalance:

• Cloud adoption. Every cloud resource that assumes an identity to access another service adds to the count. An AWS EC2 instance using an IAM role to reach an S3 bucket is one NHI among thousands.
• Microservices. Each service needs credentials to authenticate to databases, message queues, and other services, so service account sprawl accelerates with every decomposition.
• SaaS integrations. Each connected application requires its own OAuth tokens or API keys, expanding the estate one integration at a time.
• AI and automation. Agentic AI is the fastest-growing category. Autonomous agents create identities and request credentials at machine speed, and Palo Alto Networks research suggests agents could outnumber humans by 82 to 1 in environments that adopt them heavily.

The pattern is consistent: organisations are scaling identity creation faster than identity governance, and the disparity compounds.

Common Types of Non-Human Identities

Effective non-human identity management starts with recognising the distinct categories operating across your infrastructure. Each type carries its own credential and its own failure mode.

NHI type	Common examples	Credential used	Typical sprawl risk
Service accounts	App-to-database access, scheduled jobs, backend automation	Passwords, keys	Overprivileged, never rotated, outlive their purpose
API keys	SaaS integrations, third-party connectors, internal APIs	Static API keys	Hardcoded in code or config, broadly scoped
OAuth tokens	App-to-app SaaS connections, delegated access	Access and refresh tokens	Bearer access, long-lived refresh tokens, scope creep
Certificates	TLS, code signing, machine-to-machine authentication	Digital certificates, keys	Untracked expiry, theft enables impersonation risk
Workload identities	Cloud IAM roles, managed identities, Kubernetes service accounts	Federated tokens, IAM roles	Misconfigured trust, cross-cloud lateral movement
AI agents	Autonomous agents, RPA bots, MCP-connected tools	Tokens, API keys, secrets	Machine-speed creation, unpredictable access paths

Machine identities are a useful subset to call out. The term usually refers to the cryptographic identities, such as TLS certificates and SSH keys, that physical or virtual machines use to authenticate themselves. Non-human identity is the broader category that also covers service accounts, application credentials, and API keys. Both fall under the same governance problem.

Why Non-Human Identity Sprawl Creates Security Risk

Sprawl is not just an operational nuisance. It widens the attack surface, creates security blind spots, and undermines the controls that protect human accounts. Attackers have noticed that the human door is locked, so they walk around to the back, where unmonitored NHIs provide persistent, MFA-free access.

The Visibility Gap

There is rarely a single pane of glass that shows every non-human identity. AWS holds IAM roles and access keys, Azure holds service principals and managed identities, Google Cloud holds service accounts, and each SaaS platform holds its own connected apps and tokens. Most of these identities are created without security review or centralised tracking.

A Cloud Security Alliance survey found that only 15 percent of organisations feel highly confident in their ability to prevent NHI attacks, while 69 percent express active concern about them. You cannot govern what you cannot see, and most security teams cannot yet see the full estate.

The Lifecycle Gap: Machine-Speed Creation, Human-Speed Governance

This is the core mechanic of sprawl. Identities are created programmatically in seconds, but they are governed by human-speed processes that run quarterly at best. The mismatch guarantees a growing backlog of unmanaged identities.

The data shows how badly retirement lags creation. The same Cloud Security Alliance research found that only 20 percent of organisations have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys. When an employee leaves, their user account is disabled within hours, but the service accounts they created, the API keys they generated, and the OAuth apps they authorised often keep working indefinitely. Rotation policies for non-human credentials trail far behind password policies for humans, because the operational risk of breaking production outweighs the perceived security benefit.

Secrets Sprawl and Credential Exposure

Every NHI depends on a secret, and secrets leak. GitGuardian’s State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 report detected 28.65 million new hardcoded secrets in public GitHub commits during 2025 alone, a 34 percent increase year over year and the largest single-year jump on record. The report also found that 64 percent of secrets leaked in 2022 were still valid in early 2026, which means most exposed credentials are never revoked.

Secrets sprawl extends well beyond source code. Roughly 28 percent of incidents originated outside repositories, in collaboration tools such as Slack, Jira, and Confluence, where credentials are pasted during urgent troubleshooting and then forgotten. Internal repositories are around six times more likely than public ones to contain hardcoded secrets, because developers assume private systems are safe.

This is where non-human identity sprawl and secrets sprawl meet: more identities mean more credentials, and more credentials mean more exposure that attackers can harvest and replay.

AI Agents and the MCP Credential Surface

Agentic AI has accelerated NHI creation beyond what manual governance can handle. As teams adopt new AI tools, they create more tokens, keys, and service identities, often without equivalent governance. GitGuardian reported that credential leaks tied to AI services rose 81 percent year over year in 2025, the fastest-growing category of all.

The Model Context Protocol, which connects AI models to external tools and data, has become a new and largely unmonitored leak surface. GitGuardian found 24,008 unique secrets exposed in MCP-related configuration files on public GitHub in a single year, a problem worsened by setup guides that encourage placing API keys directly into config files. As agentic adoption grows, this pattern threatens to spread at ecosystem speed.

Human vs Non-Human Identities

Unlike human identities, NHIs cannot complete interactive authentication challenges, do not follow predictable working hours, and are not tied to an HR lifecycle. That makes traditional identity and access management controls a poor fit. The table below summarises why.

Dimension	Human identities	Non-human identities
Authentication	Interactive login, MFA, risk-based challenges	Static secrets, tokens, certificates, no MFA
Lifecycle trigger	Hire, transfer, terminate via HR	Tied to a service, project, or workload; often no trigger to retire
Behaviour baseline	Working hours, location, device patterns	Operates 24/7, no normal pattern to baseline against
Ownership	Clear individual and manager	Frequently orphaned or unknown
Scale	Bounded by headcount	Outnumbers humans by 45:1 or more
Oversight	Periodic access reviews	Rarely reviewed, rarely rotated

The takeaway for security leaders is that NHIs need their own controls, applied with automation that operates at machine scale, rather than human-centric processes stretched to fit.

How to Measure Non-Human Identity Sprawl

Before you can manage sprawl, you need to quantify it. These metrics give security teams a practical baseline and a way to track progress over time:

• NHI-to-human ratio. Count active non-human identities against human accounts. A rising ratio signals accelerating sprawl.
• Orphaned identity rate. The percentage of NHIs with no known owner or no activity in the last 90 days.
• Credential age. The age distribution of secrets, keys, and certificates. Long-lived static credentials are the highest risk.
• Time to revoke. How long it takes to rotate or revoke a credential after exposure is detected. Hours is good; days is dangerous.
• Privilege concentration. The share of NHIs holding administrative or broad write access they do not use.
• Coverage gap. The percentage of environments (cloud, SaaS, on-premises) not yet included in your NHI inventory.

If you cannot answer these questions today, your identity creation is outpacing your security posture, and that gap is the priority to close.

How to Manage and Secure Non-Human Identities at Scale

Securing non-human identities requires the same rigour applied to human identities, delivered through automation. Effective non-human identity security spans visibility, governance, least privilege, secrets management, and detection. Consistent security policies that span cloud infrastructure, SaaS, and on-premises systems help security teams secure NHIs as one estate rather than platform by platform. The five disciplines below work together.

Many organisations rely on a mix of security tools that were never designed for machine identities, which leaves gaps in cohesion and coverage. Purpose-built NHI management and identity security solutions are emerging to close those security gaps, but tooling alone is not enough. The disciplines below describe how to manage non-human identities effectively, whether you rely on automation tools, native cloud controls, or dedicated platforms.

1. Discovery and Visibility

You cannot secure what you cannot see, so discovery comes first. Inventory every NHI across cloud, SaaS, and on-premises systems: service accounts, IAM roles, managed identities, OAuth apps, API keys, certificates, Kubernetes secrets, and AI agents. Automated discovery that continuously scans cloud APIs and secret stores keeps the inventory current as new identities appear. The goal is a unified view that answers a simple question: what is talking to what, and with which permissions.

2. Lifecycle Governance

Treat every NHI as a managed asset with an owner. Establish approval workflows for creating new identities, assign accountability for certifying access, and tie each identity to the lifecycle of the task or service it supports. Automate decommissioning when a project ends or a vendor is offboarded, so identities retire on schedule rather than lingering. Centralising identity lifecycle management lets teams track and control NHIs across environments instead of platform by platform.

3. Least Privilege and Access Control

Apply the principle of least privilege to every identity. Grant only the permissions an NHI needs for its specific function, avoid broad or admin-level access by default, and review entitlements regularly. Right-size overprivileged service accounts, audit OAuth scopes against actual usage, and remove unused permissions from stale integrations. Watching for toxic combinations, where two reasonable permissions combine into an unexpected attack path, is just as important as reviewing single grants.

4. Secrets Management and Rotation

Move credentials out of code and configuration and into dedicated secrets management tools. Replace hardcoded secrets with vaulted, short-lived credentials wherever possible, and enforce automated rotation so the exposure window stays small if a credential is compromised. For the large share of NHIs that cannot yet move to a cryptographic workload identity model, centralised secrets management combined with automated rotation is the practical baseline. Pair this with continuous scanning of repositories and collaboration tools to catch leaks early.

5. Behavioural Detection and Zero Trust

Static inventories show what exists at a point in time, but they miss compromise. Behavioural detection establishes a baseline for each identity and alerts on anomalies: a token authenticating from an unexpected network, a service account suddenly reading data it has never touched, or an OAuth app requesting new scopes months after install. Extend zero trust principles to machines by continuously verifying every service account and workload identity, rather than trusting any credential by default. Feed NHI anomalies into your SIEM and incident response playbooks so detection connects to response.

NHI Security Maturity Model

Use this model to locate your programme and plan the next step.

Stage	Visibility	Governance	Credentials	Detection
Ad hoc	Spreadsheets, partial	No owners, no offboarding	Hardcoded, static	None
Reactive	Per-platform inventories	Manual quarterly reviews	Some vaulting	Alerts after incidents
Managed	Unified inventory	Owners assigned, approval workflows	Vaulted, scheduled rotation	Baselines and anomaly alerts
Optimised	Continuous discovery	Automated lifecycle, just-in-time access	Short-lived workload identities	Real-time behavioural detection, zero trust

Most organisations sit between ad hoc and reactive. The progression to managed and optimised is where sprawl comes under control.

A Phased Roadmap to Control NHI Sprawl

Programmes succeed when they sequence the work rather than attempting everything at once.

1. Discover and baseline. Build a unified inventory and calculate your NHI-to-human ratio, orphaned rate, and credential age. You cannot prioritise without a baseline.
2. Eliminate the worst exposures. Revoke orphaned identities, rotate the oldest static secrets, and remove the most dangerous standing privileges first.
3. Establish ownership and lifecycle. Assign owners, add approval workflows, and automate decommissioning so the backlog stops growing.
4. Centralise secrets and enforce rotation. Vault credentials, replace long-lived secrets with short-lived ones, and scan continuously for leaks.
5. Add behavioural detection. Baseline each identity and alert on deviations, integrating with existing security operations.
6. Govern AI agents from day one. Apply the same discovery, least privilege, and rotation discipline to agents and MCP integrations before they scale.

Run the early stages as a continuous loop rather than a one-time project. Sprawl regenerates, so the controls have to be ongoing.

Conclusion

Non-human identity sprawl is now one of the defining identity security challenges, because creation velocity has outpaced governance maturity across nearly every organisation. Machine identities outnumber human users by large and growing margins, they authenticate without MFA, and they persist long after their purpose ends. The organisations that bring sprawl under control are the ones that treat NHIs as first-class assets: discovering them continuously, governing their full lifecycle, enforcing least privilege, vaulting and rotating their secrets, and watching their behaviour in real time. The estate will keep growing, so the discipline has to be continuous. Start by measuring your own sprawl, then close the largest gaps first.