Originally published by Oasis Security.

Written by Marta Dern.

We’ve covered the ins and outs of Non-Human Identity (NHI) Management—what it is, why it matters, and the best practices for handling these digital identities. But how do you translate theory into action? What does the deployment of an effective NHI Management program look like in practice?

Just like any successful initiative, a solid plan is the foundation.

As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, "A goal without a plan is just a wish"—and in security, that’s a risk we cannot afford. This guide will walk you through the key steps to transform your objectives into a strategic, actionable roadmap, ensuring that your organization can efficiently manage and secure its non-human identities.

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Step 1: Define the Scope and Set Goals

Start by defining clear objectives and success criteria to guide your Non-Human Identity Management program. Begin with stakeholder mapping, involving key players like the CISO, cloud administrators, and security architects to navigate the NHI landscape and implement policies effectively.

Then, conduct environment mapping to document all relevant environments—cloud, on-premise, and hybrid—where NHIs operate. This step doesn't include scanning yet, but defines the applications and environments that will be in scope for further discovery.

Set clear success criteria aligned with business goals, such as reducing stale identities by 30% in the first quarter or achieving 100% visibility of all NHIs.

As the NHIM program manager, gather stakeholders to understand risk, map business initiatives, and identify barriers to ensure your program is on track for success.

Pro Tip: Align your goals with broader business objectives to secure executive buy-in and ensure the program gets the support it needs.

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Step 2: Select an NHIM tool

Choosing the right tool is critical to your program’s success. Select a solution that addresses the risks and business priorities identified in Step 1, and that can handle your specific environment—whether it’s cloud, on-premise, hybrid, or all of the above. Ensure the tool supports key areas like identity discovery, ownership assignment, periodic attestation, automatic remediation, and lifecycle management. For hybrid environments, make sure the tool provides seamless management across different systems and integrates with your security stack (IAM, PAM, etc.).

Quick Tip: Look for tools that scale with your organization and integrate smoothly with existing Security stack - IAM, PAM, and cloud systems. Context leads to action.

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Step 3: Define and understand your perimeter

With your tool selected, the next step is to gain full visibility into your NHI perimeter. Use the tool to scan, discover, and inventory all NHIs across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. Once visibility is achieved, assign ownership of each NHI to ensure accountability throughout its lifecycle—from creation to decommissioning. This will help avoid unmanaged or orphaned accounts, which can create security vulnerabilities.

Pro Tip: Assign NHI owners who will actively track and manage identities, ensuring that every account is accounted for and properly governed.

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Step 4: Define a policy framework and set priorities

Once your perimeter is mapped, it's time to establish a robust policy framework and set clear priorities. Define policies that govern NHI access, attestation, secret rotation or federation and decommissioning. Implement least-privilege access for all NHIs and automate key processes such as secret rotation, recertification, and auditing. Your policies should align with industry best practices and regulatory standards like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework or Zero Trust Architecture.

Pro Tip: Automate policy enforcement wherever possible to reduce manual oversight, ensuring compliance without increasing the administrative burden.

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Step 5: Strengthen security posture

Evaluate and address NHIs that fall outside established policies, such as over-privileged accounts or unrotated secrets. Break the problem into manageable parts to prioritize and resolve the most critical risks first, ensuring effective and efficient remediation.

Implement continuous monitoring to detect anomalies or suspicious activity related to NHIs in real-time. Automate workflows to swiftly remediate vulnerabilities, such as rotating exposed secrets or decommissioning stale/inactive accounts. Focus on the most urgent risks to achieve quick wins, reduce exposure, and demonstrate immediate value.

Pro Tip: As your organization grows, ensure your NHIM program evolves by scaling these monitoring and remediation efforts to maintain strong security across all environments.

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Step 6: Automate lifecycle management

After strengthening your security posture with continuous monitoring and remediation, the next step is to automate the lifecycle management of NHIs. Automation ensures that provisioning, secret rotation, compliance, attestation and decommissioning are consistently applied without manual intervention, minimizing errors and operational overhead.

Start by automating key processes:

• Provisioning: Ensure NHIs are created with the correct access and privileges from the beginning.
• Secret Rotation: For those identities that still require a secret, automate regular secret updates to reduce the risk of exposure.
• Attestation: Periodically review the context, validity, and permissions of identities to maintain security.
• Compliance: Document each change or modification to identities to facilitate audits and ensure regulatory alignment.
• Decommissioning: Automatically retire NHIs that are no longer needed, preventing orphaned accounts that could pose security risks.

Begin with pilot automation in non-production environments to test workflows and policies. Once validated, scale automation across your organization to streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and maintain compliance as your business grows.

Pro Insight: Automating lifecycle management reduces manual effort while ensuring continuous alignment with evolving security policies and business needs.

An NHIM program:

Secure NHIs, Secure Future

Deploying an NHI management program is a critical step that can significantly reduce your organization’s risk exposure. By following these steps—defining the scope, selecting an NHIM tool, understanding your perimeter, establishing a policy framework, and adopting security posture and automating the lifecycle—you not only secure your digital ecosystem but also foster a culture of proactive security management.

As NHIs continue to proliferate, managing them effectively isn’t just a best practice—it’s a necessity. If you haven’t started already, the time is now.