Secure non-human identities with Okta’s unified platform
While organizations have traditionally focused on securing human users, a new challenge has emerged that demands immediate attention: non-human identities (NHIs). Service accounts, API keys, tokens, and machine-to-machine connections have become prime targets for attackers. These identities operate silently in the background of your organization, often with elevated privileges and lax security controls and monitoring, making them particularly valuable entry points for threat actors.
Why security teams are struggling
Security teams face four critical challenges with non-human identities. First, the scale is overwhelming — NHIs are scattered across different tools and teams, operating invisibly behind the scenes without a clear lifecycle and audit, unlike human users. Second, these identities often have elevated permissions, creating high-risk scenarios when compromised. Third, most were built without security fundamentals like MFA, instead using permanent credentials rather than temporary access. Finally, a lack of proper lifecycle management and audits creates "unused but still active" accounts — created for temporary projects but never deactivated — and creates significant exposure that attackers actively target.
The rising priority of non-human Identity Security
Three key factors have elevated NHI security to a top priority for security teams. The proliferation of AI and automation has created a vast new attack surface, with organizations deploying more machine identities than ever before without corresponding security controls. AI agents represent a particularly concerning risk as they may escalate privileges beyond intended boundaries or trigger unintended consequences while operating with high-level access.
Meanwhile, attackers have shifted their focus, increasingly targeting service accounts and API keys as entry points for sophisticated breaches. The security industry has recognized this shift, with the OWASP Top 10 Non-Human Identity Risks now explicitly highlighting these vulnerabilities and signaling that traditional identity approaches are insufficient for securing machine identities.
Okta's comprehensive approach to non-human Identity Security
Addressing this complex challenge requires a multi-layered solution that provides visibility and control. Okta's integrated approach combines two powerful solutions to secure your entire Identity landscape.
Okta Identity Security Posture Management
You can't secure what you can't see. Okta Identity Security Posture Management provides critical insights into your NHI landscape across your Identity providers, SaaS applications, and cloud Infrastructure — a crucial capability as these downstream applications continue to proliferate across organizations. These insights, automatically discovered and classified, enable the prioritization of service accounts, API keys, and other machine identities that might otherwise remain hidden.
ISPM proactively identifies and reduces risks by spotting critical issues like unrotated credentials, overprivileged machine identities, and unused service accounts that bypass MFA and SSO, which create unnecessary exposure. This visibility allows security teams to prioritize remediation efforts based on real risk, not assumptions.
The solution also aligns your security efforts with industry frameworks like the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10, ensuring your security program addresses the most pressing vulnerabilities in a structured, prioritized way.
Okta Privileged Access
Visibility must be paired with control. Okta Privileged Access enables security teams to implement robust management for service accounts across your organization. It helps you federate, vault, and centrally manage service accounts alongside human identities, bringing machine credentials into a unified governance model.
OPA implements secure credential management with automated rotation policies, eliminating the risks associated with static, long-lived secrets. This approach dramatically reduces the attack surface presented by forgotten or unmanaged service accounts.
The solution provides just-in-time access for NHIs, enforcing least privilege principles across your machine identity landscape and ensuring service accounts have exactly the permissions they need — no more, no less.
Remediation Through Orchestration
Finding issues is only the first step. The real value comes through orchestrated remediation. ISPM provides critical visibility into security issues across your NHI landscape, while OPA delivers the robust management capabilities needed to prevent them by properly securing and managing these identities before they become a problem. Using Okta Workflows as the orchestration layer, organizations can automate the remediation process — turning ISPM's insights into action by triggering the appropriate responses. This approach eliminates manual intervention and scales security response across the enterprise.
Join us at RSA Conference
NHIs represent your greatest vulnerability and your opportunity to establish a truly comprehensive security posture. We invite you to join us at RSA Conference to learn more about securing your machine Identity landscape:
RSAC Session
Moscone North Expo Briefing Center (#6545)
3:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
You can also visit us at the Moscone South Expo (Booth #1349) to see these solutions in action and discuss how Okta can help your organization address the growing challenge of NHI security.
