Non-Human Identities (NHI) Glossary

Non-Human Identities (NHI) Glossary

Understand the critical and growing area of Non-Human Identity management. Explore our comprehensive glossary of service accounts, bots, APIs, and the governance of the automated cloud.

NHI Definitionss

Non-Human Identity (NHI)

A Non-Human Identity (NHI) is any digital entity that is not a human user but requires access to systems, data, or applications to perform automated tasks.

Technical Deep Dive NHIs include service accounts, bots, APIs, workloads, serverless functions, and lot devices. They often outnumber human identities by 45 to 1 and frequently possess standing, over-provisioned privileges.
The ObserveID Advantage

Observeld treats NHIs as first-class citizens. Our platform provides the same level of deep visibility and governance for service accounts and bots as it does for human users, helping you identify and manage "orphan" NHis

NHI Sprawl

NHI Sprawl

The rapid and often unmanaged growth of non-human identities within an organization, driven by the adoption of microservices and CI/CD pipelines, creating a massive, unmonitored attack surface.

Secret Management

Secret Management

The practice of securely storing and managing the credentials (API keys, tokens, passwords) used by NHIs. Poor management, such as hardcoding keys, is a leading cause of breaches.

NHI Behavioral Intelligence

NHI Behavioral Intelligence

The use of Al and machine learning to establish a baseline of "normal" behavior for a non-human identity, triggering automated responses to unusual activity.

The ObserveID Advantage

ObserveID's Al-driven platform continuously monitors NHI behavior, detecting anomalies in real-time and automating remediation to prevent lateral movement and data exfiltration.

Frequently Asked Questions

Direct answers to critical questiona about Zero Trust Implementation

Why are NHIs more dangerous than human identities?

They often lack traditional security controls like MFA, have broad standing privileges, and are much more numerous, making them harder to monitor and govern manually.

What is an "Orphan" NHI?

A service account or API key that is no longer being used by an application but still has active permissions, creating a major security hole.

How many NHIs does the average company have?

In modern cloud-first enterprises, it is common to have 45 non-human identities for every one human user.

How does ObservelD manage NHI risk?

By providing unified visibility, analyzing entitlement usage, and using Al to monitor behavior and automate the removal of excessive permissions.

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