What is Non-Human Identity (NHI)?
Non-Human Identity (NHI) is the set of digital identities assigned to machines, services, workloads, APIs, and AI agents rather than to people. NHI management covers how those identities are created, governed, rotated, and revoked across an enterprise environment.
What it does
NHI management platforms handle identities that belong to software rather than humans. That includes service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, certificates, cloud workload identities, and, increasingly, AI agents. Core functions include:
- Discovery: finding every service account, token, and API credential in use, including ones created without IT approval.
- Ownership mapping: linking each NHI to a responsible human owner or team.
- Least-privilege enforcement: restricting what each identity can access to only what it needs.
- Credential rotation: automatically cycling secrets, API keys, and certificates on a schedule or after a detected event.
- Access reviews: producing periodic reports so teams can certify or revoke NHI permissions.
- Agentic identity governance: anchoring AI agent actions to a known, auditable identity tied to a human sponsor in the IdP.
Why teams buy it
Service accounts and API tokens outnumber human accounts in most enterprises by a wide margin. They are often over-privileged, rarely rotated, and poorly documented. Attackers target them because compromising one token can grant broad access without triggering MFA. Regulatory frameworks increasingly require organizations to govern all identities, not just human ones. AI agents add urgency: an agent that can call APIs or write data needs an identity with defined, auditable permissions.
NHI tools sit inside the broader IAM category alongside Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) and Privileged Access Management (PAM). They overlap with Secrets Management for credential storage and with Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) for cloud-specific workload permissions.