According to ESG research, Non-Human Identities (NHIs), such as service accounts, service principals, managed accounts, secrets, keys, and access tokens, are growing 20% year-over-year, powering automation across legacy, cloud, and agentic AI architectures. The volume of NHIs being created across cloud and hybrid environments has grown rapidly as organizations accelerate digital transformation and innovation.
As Agentic AI reshapes infrastructure, machines now act independently, spinning up resources, accessing systems, and making decisions. Identity remains the control plane, but it must evolve–most identity programs and tooling remain built around human-centric processes, creating a fundamental gap in managing the lifecycle of NHIs.
Provisioning is one of the most challenging aspects of NHI management and security today, plagued by fragmented processes, ungoverned sprawl, and manual workflows.
Challenges with the Manual Approach to ProvisioningÂ
Even mature organizations with well-documented policies struggle to manage NHI creation effectively. For example, provisioning is still manual or semi-automated at best, relying on ticketing systems, human approvals, and disconnected tooling. As a result, identity teams operate in constant firefighting mode: tracking down unrotated credentials, retroactively enforcing permissions, and reacting to compliance gaps only after they’ve become a risk.
Identity teams also face increasing friction with development teams. Developers require fast, flexible access to infrastructure and services, while identity requires governance, control, and visibility. Without an automated, policy-enforced provisioning process, these teams are misaligned, often resulting in security becoming a bottleneck or being bypassed entirely.
Complicating things further, many organizations are locked into proprietary vaults and legacy tooling that were never designed to scale in multi-cloud or DevOps environments. These limitations reduce architectural flexibility and force teams to rely on brittle, inconsistent manual integrations.
Without automated NHI provisioning, organizations cannot scale secure access in line with infrastructure growth. Risks are addressed after the fact, if at all, and critical gaps such as unrotated secrets or excessive permissions are left open for attackers to exploit.
This is especially problematic in cloud-first environments where identity is the new perimeter, and the speed of deployment is constant. Manual provisioning simply cannot keep up. To maintain a strong security posture without slowing down development, governance must be embedded directly into the provisioning process. Security must shift from static, identity-based control to real-time, intent-driven enforcement at machine speed.
Critical Need for Automated Provisioning
Modern security teams and developers need capabilities that automate the creation, governance, and security of NHIs. Adopting a solution that is purpose-built to manage NHIs at scale, with governance embedded into every stage of the identity lifecycle – from creation to decommissioning – is key.
Core capabilities to look for in an automated NHI provisioning solution include:
- Request and approval workflows via UI or API
- Support for credential-based and federated identities
- Support for multi-cloud, PaaS and SaaS
- Automated creation and vaulting of credentials with support for cloud native key vaults and secret managers
- Individual or group-based ownership assignment
- Ownership assignment and policy enforcement at creation
- Continuous compliance monitoring and lifecycle automation
These capabilities allow security and identity teams to standardize and enforce controls without impeding developer velocity. Eliminating manual processes reduces delays and human error, and standardized provisioning across cloud and vault creates added benefits.
From Reactive Controls to Proactive, Continuous Governance
Automated provisioning redefines identity security by automating provisioning with built-in governance, enabling security teams to reduce risk, remove error-prone manual tasks and enhance developers’ productivity.
With automated provisioning, NHIs are secured by default the moment they are created and throughout their lifecycle – every NHI is created with ownership, least privilege, and rotation policies in place. Automated provisioning helps organizations avoid risk and stay ahead of identity-based attacks.
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