How to Secure Non-Human Identities: Best Practices to Manage Bots, Tokens, and API Keys

Non-Human Identities (NHIs), which include service accounts, bots, and API keys, currently surpass human users by 17 to 1 and are responsible for controlling 80% of cloud resources, as reported in the Veza 2026 State of Identity and Access Report. Despite their prevalence, NHIs often lack the security measures applied to human identities, leading to a vast "shadow" attack surface. To secure NHI lifecycles without hindering deployment speed, organizations should establish a single source of truth to manage identities, apply "identity-first" security principles, automate lifecycle management, and monitor behavioral patterns. This involves using automated tools for real-time inventory, assigning ownership, enforcing the Principle of Least Privilege, leveraging short-lived credentials, employing zero trust architecture, centralizing secrets in secure vaults, automating key rotations, ensuring rigorous offboarding, and setting up anomaly detection systems. By decomposing the identity lifecycle into manageable units and automating processes, organizations can effectively reduce operational burdens and enhance security.