Machine And AI Identities: The Silent Explosion In The Cybersecurity Landscape
As organisations race to modernise their tech stacks—adopting microservices, automation, and AI-driven systems—machine and AI identities have quietly become one of the largest and least governed segments of the identity ecosystem.
While human identities are typically well-accounted for in IAM programs, the explosive growth of non-human identities—service accounts, workloads, bots, containers, and AI agents—has outpaced traditional security controls. In fact, machine identities now outnumber human users by more than 40 to 1 in many enterprises.
And yet, they’re often the most poorly secured.
The Expanding Risk Surface
Non-human identities aren’t new, but their scale and complexity have changed dramatically.
Think about what’s common in today’s environment:
- Automated workflows in CI/CD pipelines
- Microservices communicating via APIs
- AI agents making real-time decisions or calls
- IoT and edge devices generating new identities on the fly
Each of these components requires an identity to authenticate, access resources, or take action.
But when these identities are:
- Over-permissioned
- Poorly audited
- Never rotated
- Unknown to the security team
… they become prime targets for attackers.
Credential theft is still one of the top vectors for breaches—and machine identities often hold powerful, long-standing credentials with little oversight.
Common Challenges Organisations Face
-
Lack of Visibility
Many teams don’t have a centralised view of where machine identities exist, what they can access, or how they’re managed. Shadow identities can linger for years, creating persistent access for potential attackers. -
Manual and Inconsistent Governance
Provisioning and de-provisioning of machine identities is often manual, inconsistent, and lacks proper documentation. Ownership is usually unclear, especially across DevOps, security, and infrastructure teams. -
Overly Permissive Access
Many machine identities are created with “set it and forget it” privileges—meaning they have far more access than needed and no process for timely revocation. -
Security Tool Sprawl
Disparate tools across cloud environments and business units create policy gaps and missed opportunities for consistent enforcement. -
AI Agents Worsening Identity Sprawl
As AI agents are integrated into workflows—from copilots to fully autonomous bots—they introduce another layer of machine identity that requires governance, authentication, and access controls.
Principles for Securing Machine and AI Identities
The good news? This is an addressable problem—if we treat machine and AI identities as first-class citizens in our identity programs.
Here are some key principles to adopt:
-
Discover and inventory all non-human identities
Build a baseline. Know what you have—across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments. -
Adopt a zero-standing privilege model
Use just-in-time (JIT) and just-enough access (JEA) for machine identities the same way we do for human users. -
Automate credential rotation and lifecycle
management
Manual processes won’t scale. Automate provisioning, rotation, and deprovisioning of secrets and credentials. -
Enforce policy-based access control
Move toward policies that define what roles and services are allowed, instead of hardcoded access controls or broad permissions. -
Monitor and audit machine identity behaviour
Just like with humans, behaviour analytics can flag abnormal or risky usage. Look for signs of compromise or lateral movement. -
Prepare for the AI wave
Establish clear governance for AI agents—including credential usage, auditing, and offboarding. Don't let AI identities become the next frontier of technical debt.
Final Thoughts
As we adopt more automation and AI, non-human identities will only continue to grow.
Ignoring them is no longer an option.
Forward-thinking organisations are proactively building strategies to manage, monitor, and secure machine and AI identities—before attackers do it for them.
The stakes are high, but so is the opportunity to build a more resilient and secure identity foundation that supports innovation without compromise.