Lifecycle management for non-human identities (NHIs) is the process of governing service accounts, API keys, certificates, and machine identities from creation through active use to decommissioning — preventing the accumulation of stale, orphaned, or over-privileged machine credentials.
⚙️ How Does It Work?
NHI lifecycle management tracks every machine identity, maps it to its owning application and team, monitors last-used timestamps, enforces credential rotation schedules, and automatically flags or decommissions unused identities.
📍 Where Is It Used?
Any organization with cloud workloads, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, or legacy applications — where NHIs typically outnumber human identities by 10:1 or more.
💡 Real-World Example
A company discovers 4,000 service accounts during an NHI audit. 60% have not been used in over 90 days. Their lifecycle management platform automatically disables the dormant accounts after a 30-day grace period, reducing the NHI attack surface by more than half.
🔗 Related Terms
Stay Ahead in Identity Security
Get weekly IAM, PAM & IGA insights via Identity Pulse.
Subscribe to Identity Pulse →