Non-human Identities (NHIs) now represent a significant and rapidly expanding portion of the enterprise attack surface. A NHI & Secrets Risk Report H1 2025, released by Entro Security, indicates there are 144 NHIs per human identity. That matters because service accounts, API keys, certificates, scripts, and machine tokens often run quietly in the background with broad permissions, weak ownership, and little day-to-day scrutiny.
Why NHIs become risky
The real problem is not that non-human identities exist. The problem is that they often sit outside normal identity governance, so teams do not know who owns them, why they still exist, what they can access, or whether their credentials are still safe.
In practice, NHI risk typically manifests in a few consistent ways.
- Orphaned service accounts remain active after an application or workload has changed.
- Static credentials stay in place for too long because rotation is manual and disruptive.
- Certificates expire unexpectedly, causing outages or forcing rushed workarounds.
- Privileged machine accounts accumulate more access than they actually need.
- Security teams can clearly see the human side of IAM, but machine-to-machine trust remains fragmented across tools and teams.
Why fragmented tools fall short
Many organizations try to handle NHIs with separate point solutions for discovery, privileged access, certificates, vulnerabilities, and device control. The result is partial visibility, duplicated work, and a governance gap between identity, infrastructure, and security operations.
SecHard’s platform model is useful here because it treats NHI protection as a hygiene problem spanning identity hygiene, privilege hygiene, and access hygiene, rather than as a single feature within a single product category. Its updated structure brings those controls together through Cybersecurity Asset Manager, Privileged Access Manager, Multi Factor Authenticator, Security Hardening, Vulnerability Center, Patch Manager, Key Manager, TACACS and RADIUS, Device and Performance Manager, and Risk Manager.
A more complete NHI workflow
A useful way to think about NHI protection is as a sequence, not a single control. First, you discover what is running and where it lives with Cybersecurity Asset Manager, then you verify and govern access with Multi-Factor Authenticator, Privileged Access Manager, and TACACS and RADIUS.
After that, you reduce exposure by tightening configurations with Security Hardening, identifying weaknesses through Vulnerability Center, and remediating them with Patch Manager. Key Manager supports the credential side of the workflow by keeping certificate-based trust from becoming a blind spot, while Risk Manager helps teams decide what to fix first.
That model aligns well with Zero Trust principles already reflected in SecHard’s broader architecture, including explicit verification, least privilege, and continuous assessment of users, devices, services, and workloads. It also makes NHI security more operational by enabling teams to move from scattered visibility to a repeatable hygiene cycle of discovery, verification, control, remediation, and review.
What makes this relevant now
Non-human identities have evolved from being a minor concern associated with a few service accounts. They now encompass a wide range of elements, including cloud workloads, applications, certificates, APIs, network devices, automation scripts, and interconnected infrastructure. This shift indicates that the governance challenge is significantly broader and more operational than what traditional IAM teams were originally designed to manage.
That is why the SecHard Cyber Hygiene platform is significant in this context. It transforms NHI management from an abstract identity challenge into a more tangible and manageable process. With features such as visibility, privilege control, access enforcement, certificate lifecycle support, hardening, patching, monitoring, and risk scoring, everything operates cohesively within a single hygiene model.
To explore what a practical NHI hygiene roadmap could look like in your own environment, SecHard offers working sessions focused on real infrastructure challenges across servers, network devices, and cloud workloads. These conversations are designed to help teams connect visibility, access, hardening, remediation, and monitoring needs to the platform’s updated modules in a more structured way. You can request a demo or a working session with SecHard experts via www.sechard.com or by emailing [email protected]