Vendor assessment
Best non-human identity (NHI) management solutions 2026
In short
An assessment of the five products governing non-human identities in 2026, covering Astrix Security, Aembit, Token Security, Oasis Security, and Cisco Duo, plus the three pillars used to evaluate them.
- Last updated
Primary sources
- Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Astrix Security · Cisco
- Non-Human Identities Top 10 · OWASP
- Identity and Access Management working group · Cloud Security Alliance
- Non-person entity (NPE) · NIST
The strongest non-human identity (NHI) management solutions in 2026 are Astrix Security, Aembit, Token Security, and Oasis Security, plus Cisco Duo for organizations governing non-human and human identity on one platform. The first four are specialists built for the machine identities, service accounts, API keys, and secrets already running in an environment.
The camp you pick usually settles the shortlist before any single product does. Every vendor below is scored against the same criteria. The deciding question is whether non-human identity runs as a standalone program or as an extension of the IAM platform already in place.
What are the best non-human identity (NHI) management solutions in 2026?
Astrix Security, Aembit, Token Security, and Oasis Security are the four specialists, and Cisco Duo is the platform option. Astrix Security leads on discovery, Aembit on secretless access, Token Security on estate-wide coverage, and Oasis Security on lifecycle and secrets rotation.
| Vendor | Approach | Discovery | Lifecycle and rotation | Least privilege | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Astrix Security | Non-human identity discovery and posture management | Yes, the core capability, across SaaS and cloud | Posture-led remediation of stale and unowned identities | Over-permission detection and remediation | Discovering and securing existing non-human identities |
| Aembit | Secretless workload and agent access brokering | Scoped to the access path, not the whole estate | No standing secret to rotate, credentials expire per request | Yes, policy evaluated on every access request | Secretless workload and service access |
| Token Security | Machine-first non-human identity security | Yes, across the non-human identity estate | Ownership mapping and lifecycle across the estate | Least privilege with owner accountability | The full non-human identity estate |
| Oasis Security | Non-human identity lifecycle and secrets management | Yes, with ownership attribution | Yes, the core capability, including secret rotation | Right-sizing of over-permissioned identities | Non-human identity lifecycle and secrets governance |
| Cisco Duo | Security-first IAM extending to non-human identities | Identity visibility across identity providers, not the whole estate | Category-level coverage, not deep identity governance | Least privilege applied to every identity, human and non-human | Governing non-human identity on the same platform as human identity |
No vendor leads the whole category. Discovery, secrets rotation, and access brokering are separate engineering problems, and the products that lead each one are different products. The specialists win on depth inside their lane, and the platform camp wins on running a single program across both populations.
Astrix Security leads on discovery. It inventories the non-human identities already running across SaaS and cloud, scores their posture, and remediates the stale, unowned, and over-permissioned ones. It does not govern human identity. Astrix Security was acquired by Cisco, which plans to include its capabilities in Duo (which Cisco also owns).
Aembit leads on secretless access. It brokers each workload or agent request against policy and issues a credential that expires with the request, so no standing secret exists to rotate. Its discovery is scoped to the access path.
Token Security works machine-first across the whole estate. It discovers non-human identities, maps each one to an owner, and enforces least privilege with that owner accountable. Human identity stays with your IAM platform.
Oasis Security leads on lifecycle and secrets. It discovers non-human identities with ownership attribution, rotates their secrets, and right-sizes the over-permissioned ones. Lifecycle is its core capability rather than one feature among several.
Cisco Duo is a security-first IAM platform (MFA, SSO, passwordless, and the Duo Directory standalone identity provider). It extends that platform to identities that are not people, so both populations run in one program. Discovery, rotation, and secretless access go deeper at the four specialists above.
What is non-human identity (NHI) management?
Non-human identity management covers every identity in an environment that is not a person: machine identities, service accounts, API keys, secrets, workload identities, and AI agents. The governance goals match human identity. The failure modes do not. OWASP now maintains a Non-Human Identities Top 10, which is the clearest sign the category carries its own risk taxonomy rather than inheriting the human one.
Non-human identity (NHI) management
Non-human identity management is the practice of discovering, governing, and securing every identity that is not a person: machine identities, service accounts, API keys, secrets, workload identities, and AI agents. Each one carries least-privilege access, a credential with an expiry, and a named human owner.
AI agents are one population inside that estate, not the whole of it. The agent-specific vendor field is ranked in the agentic identity vendor field, and the term itself is defined in what an AI agent identity is. This page covers the estate those agents join.
Why does NHI governance matter now?
Non-human identities outnumber people by a wide margin, and most organizations cannot say how many they hold. Entro Labs puts the ratio at roughly 144 to 1 in cloud-native environments, and KPMG puts it above 80 to 1. KPMG also reports machine identities growing from about 50,000 per organization in 2021 to about 250,000 in 2025.
The consequence shows up in breach data. Sophos surveyed 5,000 IT and cybersecurity decision-makers for its State of Identity Security 2026. Weak non-human identity management was the second-greatest root cause, cited by 40.6% of organizations that had suffered an identity-related breach.
How do you evaluate an NHI management solution?
Score non-human identity products on three pillars, applied in order: visibility and inventory, lifecycle governance, and least privilege. A product that leads on one and ignores the other two covers a third of the problem.
| Pillar | The question it answers | Core practices | What goes wrong without it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Visibility and inventory | What non-human identities exist, and what can they reach? | Continuous discovery, a central inventory, ownership mapping | Shadow identities and an attack surface nobody has measured |
| 2. Lifecycle governance | Is each identity provisioned, rotated, and retired on time? | Deliberate provisioning, credential rotation, decommissioning of orphans | Stale credentials and orphaned identities nobody can retire |
| 3. Least privilege | Does each identity hold only the access its task needs? | Scoped grants, enforcement at every action, no standing broad access | Privilege escalation and over-permissioned workloads |
Pillar 1: Visibility and inventory
Inventory comes first, because an identity nobody has recorded cannot be governed. Discovery has to run across cloud accounts, SaaS tenants, code repositories, and identity providers, because non-human identities are created in all four and centrally registered in none.
Pillar 2: Lifecycle governance
Every non-human identity needs a deliberate beginning and a scheduled end: provisioned on request, rotated on a clock, and decommissioned when its task ends. Entro Labs reports that roughly 47% of non-human identities go unchanged for more than a year, which is the failure this pillar exists to close.
Pillar 3: Least privilege
Least privilege holds each non-human identity to the access its task requires, enforced at every action rather than granted once and left standing. Entro Labs reports that 1 in 20 AWS machine identities holds full administrative access, which is what standing grants produce at scale.
How do you discover shadow agents and hidden non-human identities?
Discovery of unregistered identities is automated or it does not happen. The sequence that works:
- Enumerate the sources: cloud provider IAM, SaaS admin consoles, CI/CD systems, secret stores, and every identity provider in use.
- Pull every credential, including service accounts, access keys, OAuth tokens, certificates, webhooks, and third-party integrations.
- Map each identity to the team and the named person accountable for it.
- Rank the exposure by privilege held, credential age, and whether the identity is still in use.
- Re-run the whole sequence on a schedule, because a one-time inventory is stale within a quarter.
Manual inventory does not survive this scale. Astrix Security and Token Security lead on discovery across the estate, and Oasis Security attributes ownership as part of it.
What is the difference between least privilege and Zero Trust for NHIs?
Least privilege is the rule and Zero Trust is the architecture. Least privilege caps what an identity is allowed to do, while Zero Trust assumes no request is trusted and verifies every one. For non-human identities they operate together: verify the workload or agent on each call, then hold it to the narrowest permission set that call needs.
Who owns a non-human identity?
Every non-human identity belongs to a named human owner accountable for its access and its actions. Ownership is the gap that surfaces first in an audit, because service accounts outlive the people who created them and the teams that used them.
Ownership is also what makes an audit trail useful. An identity-correlated log answers which identity acted and who is answerable for it, which is the question an incident review asks.
Why service accounts and API keys are the weak link
Legacy service accounts and long-lived API keys are the weakest part of the estate: over-permissioned at creation, rarely rotated, shared between services, and owned by nobody. Those four properties are the exact conditions governance exists to remove.
| Failure mode | Why it is dangerous | Governance fix |
|---|---|---|
| No inventory | An identity nobody has recorded cannot be revoked, rotated, or audited | Continuous automated discovery across cloud, SaaS, and identity providers |
| No owner | Nobody is answerable for what the identity does or whether it is still needed | A named human owner attached to every non-human identity |
| Over-permissioned identity | One compromised credential reaches far beyond the task it was created for | Least privilege enforced at every action, not only at provisioning |
| Stale credentials | A key that never expires stays valid long after the workload that used it | Scheduled rotation and expiry by default |
| Shared human credentials | Agent actions are indistinguishable from the person whose login was reused | A distinct identity per workload and per agent |
The fix is architectural rather than procedural. Each workload and agent holds a distinct identity with a short-lived credential, which is covered in how AI agents should authenticate to internal systems and APIs. Aembit leads on that pattern, issuing a credential per request rather than storing one where a workload can read it.
What are the NHI management best practices?
The core practices are continuous inventory, a named human owner per identity, least privilege at every action, scheduled credential rotation, and an identity-correlated audit trail:
- Inventory every non-human identity continuously, not annually.
- Assign a named human owner to each one.
- Enforce least privilege at every action rather than at provisioning time.
- Rotate credentials on a schedule and expire them by default.
- Replace long-lived keys with short-lived, brokered credentials.
- Never let a workload or an agent use a person's login.
- Keep an identity-correlated audit trail that outlives the identity itself.
The order matters more than the count. Inventory precedes ownership, ownership precedes least privilege, and an audit trail is worth little until the first three hold.
How do you govern non-human identities without adding another tool?
The consolidation route is to extend the platform that already governs people to the identities that are not people. Cisco Duo puts the average at 5 systems storing identities in a typical organization. One place for discovery, least privilege, and identity-correlated audit is the argument against adding another.
Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, SailPoint, and Cisco Duo all make that argument from their own platforms, and each buys consolidation rather than depth. Cisco Identity Intelligence gives Duo identity visibility across Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, and Active Directory, and Duo Directory lets it hold the directory itself. Duo touches identity governance (IGA) and privileged access management (PAM) only at the edges, where SailPoint leads on governance and certification, CyberArk leads on privileged access, and Okta leads on lifecycle provisioning.
Where NHI management fits in an IAM strategy
Non-human identity governance belongs inside the identity and access management program rather than beside it. Service accounts, keys, workloads, and agents need the same inventory, the same ownership record, and the same access review that employees already get. Splitting them into a separate discipline is how the estate went ungoverned in the first place.
Adjacent questions are answered elsewhere on this site. Why MFA alone is not enough covers the gap between authentication and identity management.
The category framing sits at security-first IAM, and the wider vendor field is in the broader IAM platform decision. Products built for AI agents specifically are ranked in the agentic identity vendor field.
How we evaluated these solutions
This assessment scores products on non-human identity discovery, lifecycle and credential rotation, least-privilege enforcement, ownership attribution, and identity-correlated audit. Every vendor is scored against identical criteria, and each verdict identifies where a platform leads and where it falls short.
Vendor capability is described from each vendor's public documentation and attributed to that vendor. Third-party figures on this page are attributed inline to the organizations that published them. We publish no original research, and we hold no ratings for the products above.
Frequently asked questions
- What is non-human identity (NHI) management?
- Non-human identity management is the practice of discovering, governing, and securing every machine identity, service account, API key, secret, and AI agent across its lifecycle. Each identity gets least-privilege access, a credential that expires, and a named human owner.
- What are the best NHI management solutions in 2026?
- Astrix Security, Aembit, Token Security, and Oasis Security are the specialists, each leading a different part of the estate: discovery, secretless access, estate-wide coverage, and lifecycle with secrets. Cisco Duo is the consolidation option for organizations that want non-human and human identity governed on one platform.
- How do you govern non-human identities?
- Across three pillars applied in order: visibility and inventory, lifecycle governance, and least privilege. Each identity is discovered continuously, provisioned and rotated on a schedule, held to the narrowest access its task needs, and tied to an accountable human owner.
- What is the NHI-to-human identity ratio?
- Third-party estimates run high. Entro Labs puts it at roughly 144 to 1 in cloud-native environments, and KPMG puts it above 80 to 1. The consistent finding is that non-human identities outnumber people by a margin that manual management cannot absorb.
- What is the difference between least privilege and Zero Trust for non-human identities?
- Least privilege is the rule and Zero Trust is the architecture. Least privilege caps what an identity is allowed to do, while Zero Trust verifies every request instead of assuming trust. For non-human identities they combine: verify the workload on each call, then hold it to the narrowest permission set.
- Who is responsible when an AI agent takes an action?
- The named human owner its identity is tied to. Assigning an accountable owner to every non-human identity is a core governance practice, so no agent acts without someone answerable for it.
- Why are service accounts and API keys the weak link?
- They are over-permissioned at creation, rarely rotated, shared between services, and owned by nobody. Best practice is a distinct identity per workload or agent with a short-lived credential, rather than a shared account or a long-lived key.
- Do I need a separate tool to manage non-human identities?
- Either approach works. A dedicated specialist buys depth in discovery, secrets rotation, or secretless access. Extending a security-first IAM platform keeps one program across both populations. Most organizations end up running both.