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Article/

The invisible risk behind non-human identities and IAM’s new role

September 21st, 2026
Cyber Defense Cyber Resilience
By Natanael dos Santos
The invisible risk behind non-human identities and IAM’s new role

For years, managing identities in our industry meant managing people. The workflow was clear: create the user, grant access, review permissions, and ensure least privilege for day-to-day operations. That work remains essential, but the landscape has changed.

Today, the fastest-growing identities in infrastructure do not belong to employees. They reside in service accounts, APIs, automations, cloud workloads, bots, and artificial intelligence agents. The problem is that most security teams continue treating the environment as if it were composed solely of human users.

The uncontrolled expansion of connections

The push for automation and integration has connected everything. For a process to run end-to-end, systems must communicate with each other continuously, without human intervention. Yet every single one of these integrations requires a credential, a token, or an API key.

The result is a silent web of access operating 24 hours a day. And each of these credentials represents a potential entry point into the corporate environment.

What are non-human identities, in practice?

For those in operations, they already make up the majority of internal traffic. We are talking about:

  • Service accounts and automated scripts;
  • APIs and system integrations;
  • Containers, microservices, and cloud workloads;
  • Bots and digital AI agents.

These elements authenticate on their own to query databases, execute routines, and trigger other systems. They act just like users, but with a critical difference: they rarely undergo the same level of audit, governance, and control applied to employees.

Where the real risk lies

Our defenses were historically designed to protect people. While we spend energy validating MFA and user password resets, thousands of non-human identities run in the background — often with administrative privileges, static keys that never expire, and access granted for old projects that no one ever deprovisioned.

If an attacker uncovers one of these credentials, they do not need to compromise an executive’s account. They gain a clean path to move laterally, escalate privileges, and access critical data without triggering traditional alerts. The biggest challenge here is not just protecting these accounts; it is having the visibility to know they exist in the first place.

Securing ecosystem Governance

Access management can no longer be limited to the payroll. In an automated, AI-driven environment, you must have complete control over everything that consumes or moves data within the company.

This is where Identity and Access Management (IAM) architecture must evolve. The role of security leadership is no longer just validating who logs in, but ensuring governance, credential rotation, and visibility across this entire invisible ecosystem.

Our security maturity in the coming years will depend on this shift. After all, protecting our data no longer relies solely on human behavior — it depends on the control we have over everything operating on their behalf.

Tags:
Access ManagementCloud SecurityCybersecurityIAMIdentity GovernanceInformation SecurityNon Human IdentitiesRisk ManagementService AccountsZeroTrust

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