As enterprise environments scale and sprawl, machine identities have quietly overtaken the identity landscape. Every new AI model, integration, or automated workload spins up more Non-Human Identities like service accounts, API tokens, keys, and background agents, that connect to sensitive systems. NHIs now outnumber humans by more than 17 to 1, and most operate without the visibility or controls that compliance and security teams need. It's a growing blind spot and a growing risk.
Veza’s new NHI Security product, now available as part of the
Veza Access platform, is designed to help organizations discover, govern, and control this sprawling category of access with the same level of discipline applied to human identities.
Identity Governance at Machine Scale
Most identity governance and PAM solutions were originally built to manage human access. While some have attempted to extend their capabilities to machine identities, they often fall short when it comes to providing full visibility or policy enforcement across modern infrastructure.
“Traditional identity governance and PAM tools were built for human identities first, and have attempted to bolt on support for machine identities,” said
Tarun Thakur, Co-Founder and CEO of Veza. “You end up with pieces of the puzzle scattered across systems, with no central place to see them all or understand their effective access.”
Veza’s approach is different by design. The platform is built from the ground up to natively discover and monitor both human and non-human identities across cloud, SaaS, infrastructure, and identity systems. Through graph-based modeling, it links NHIs with their entitlements, access paths, and ownership, offering a centralized way to apply governance policies, such as least privilege and credential rotation,at scale.
Visibility, Ownership, and Automated Governance
The NHI Security module delivers comprehensive discovery of machine identities across environments like AWS, Azure, GCP, GitHub, Okta, and Salesforce. It offers a unified view into what each identity is, what it can access, and who is responsible for it.
“Veza is designed to scale with modern infrastructure. With over 20 billion permissions under management, our platform continuously ingests authorization metadata to automatically discover machine identities across all systems, and map their effective permissions,” Thakur explained.
The platform also automates tasks such as assigning owners, identifying dormant or over-permissioned accounts, and triggering access reviews. Real-time alerts notify teams when an identity becomes orphaned or its permissions drift beyond policy.
Security, Compliance, and Response Preparedness
NHIs have become a growing target for threat actors, especially as organizations adopt AI and automation at scale. Attacks like those linked to Volt Typhoon have highlighted how machine identities often go unmonitored, despite holding privileged access.
“Attackers know that machine identities are often over-permissioned, unmonitored, and poorly owned, so they exploit them,” said Thakur. “Customers use Veza to close this gap by first gaining visibility into all NHIs and their effective access.”
With Veza, security teams can proactively shrink their attack surface by removing unnecessary access and enforcing least privilege. In the event of a breach, teams can quickly trace the impact by analyzing which identities were exposed and what data or systems were at risk. The platform also supports audit readiness by demonstrating clear control over non-human identities—an area increasingly scrutinized by regulators.
As the number of machine identities continues to grow in tandem with AI workloads and infrastructure automation, the pressure to manage them effectively will only increase. Veza’s NHI Security product offers organizations a path to govern access across human and non-human identities with consistency, automation, and accountability.
