The largest identity group has no employee badge.
Most companies know how many employees they have. For service accounts, technical users and other Non-Human Identities, the picture is often very different.
Many are created over years, receive access to critical systems and eventually disappear from view. That is where risks arise that often remain hidden in classic IAM processes.
NHI Management means the structured administration of all digital identities that do not belong to a human being.
Service accounts, API access, automations or AI agents are created continuously during operations and often remain in place for years. Usually with broad privileges and without clear ownership.
That makes NHI Management one of the most important unresolved issues in modern IAM strategy.
NHIs are created in cloud consoles, CI/CD pipelines and SaaS integrations.
The challenge is that many of these identities never appear in IAM, IGA or PAM processes. No one reviews them regularly or recertifies their access, and ownership is often unclear.
What used to be a technical issue is increasingly becoming a governance and compliance issue through NIS2 and DORA.
Many technical identities are created and later no longer actively managed. Access remains in place while ownership, purpose and accountability become unclear.
62% of identified NHIs were inactive for more than 90 days while still holding active permissions.
Entro Labs, 2025
NHIs often receive more access than they actually need. Without governance, permissions are rarely reduced and gradually spread into critical areas.
Enterprise environments average 144 Non-Human Identities per employee.
Entro Labs, 2025
For audits, it rarely matters whether an identity is human or technical. What matters is traceable access, clear ownership and controlled risk across all identities.
NIS2 transposition effective since December 2025, DORA examinations since 2026.
NIS2 / DORA
NIS2
Organisations must be able to understand which identities access critical systems and who is responsible for them. That increasingly includes technical identities.
DORA
For financial organisations, identity and access control becomes a core part of operational resilience. Automated access is increasingly in scope.
EU AI Act
As AI adoption grows, so do expectations around transparency, traceability and governance. Companies must better document how AI systems are used and which decisions they influence.
From the first inventory to full IAM integration, we support the complete journey.
We analyse your environment in a structured way: which NHIs exist in Active Directory, cloud, SaaS and CI/CD? Who is responsible and which credentials are active without ownership?
We help define ownership, build lifecycle processes and integrate NHIs into your existing IAM infrastructure.
NIS2 and DORA require demonstrable control over all identities, including machine identities. We translate regulatory expectations into concrete technical measures.
Microsoft Copilot Agents, OpenAI Agents and Power Platform workflows: each of them is a new NHI. We design the governance framework for the next generation of machine identities.
Many organisations do not know which AI agents, copilots or automations are already running in production. We create transparency around those agents, their permissions and their system connections before governance can begin.
Structured, in clear steps, aligned to your existing infrastructure.
01
Complete inventory of all NHIs across cloud, on-prem, SaaS, CI/CD and AI agents.
02
Risk assessment by criticality, privilege level and governance status.
03
Ownership, lifecycle processes, rotation and offboarding for every NHI type.
04
Integration into existing OIM or IGA structures. Auditable and compliance-ready.
Service accounts, technical users and API credentials have been part of everyday IAM work for years.
With AI agents, a new generation of digital identities is emerging: systems that not only access data, but independently take on tasks and prepare decisions.
The challenge remains the same: responsibility, traceability and clear rules must be ensured for all Non-Human Identities.
Technical identities with static entitlements. Often present, but rarely fully documented.
Automated processes with extensive rights. They emerge quickly and are rarely decommissioned.
Systems that autonomously execute tasks, prepare decisions and access enterprise data.
