Non human identities (NHI) are digital accounts used by apps, bots, and services. With their rapid growth, organizations need IAM resilience—backup and recovery—to ensure business continuity when these identities fail or are exploited.
TL;DR
Non human identities (NHI) now outnumber human ones in many enterprises, powering APIs, automation, and DevOps pipelines. But this growth creates fragility—misconfigurations, ransomware, or outages can bring operations to a halt. Acsense positions IAM backup and recovery as the resilience layer organizations need. By securing identity configurations and enabling rapid restore, you reduce risk, improve continuity, and meet compliance demands.
Table of Contents
- The Rise of Non Human Identities
- The Security Fragility of NHI
- Why IAM Resilience Matters
- Backup and Recovery: The Hidden Lifeline
- Acsense’s Perspective on IAM Resilience
- Regulatory and Compliance Drivers
- Best Practices for Building NHI Resilience
- Conclusion: From Fragility to Resilience
The Rise of Non Human Identities
The modern enterprise runs on code.
APIs, service accounts, bots, microservices, and machine-to-machine connectors all depend on non human identities (NHI). Multiple studies now show NHIs outnumber humans in many environments—ranging from 80+:1 at enterprise scale per CyberArk’s 2025 landscape and industry coverage, to ~50:1 in recent analysis from Silverfort.
These identities drive efficiency—but they also multiply risk. Unlike human users, NHIs often lack lifecycle controls, are provisioned ad hoc, and can sprawl across tenants. DevOps pipelines, CI/CD automation, and infrastructure as code all amplify their use.
Key stat: Verizon’s DBIR highlights misused credentials—including service accounts—as a leading cause of breaches.
The Security Fragility of NHI
NHI are easy to create, hard to govern, and dangerous to lose.
- Misconfigurations: A single misapplied permission for a bot can expose an entire environment.
- Ransomware and Attacks: NHIs often operate with static secrets and limited monitoring, making them attractive targets. Silverfort reports ~40% of NHIs lack a clear owner, and fewer than 6% of orgs have full NHI inventory awareness—both drivers of risk.
- Operational Risk: When a key service account fails, critical processes stop—payments, workflows, even logins.
The MGM Resorts (2023) incident shows how a compromised identity can cause days of disruption and about $100M in impact to quarterly earnings (Reuters; follow-up: Reuters).
Surveys reinforce the gap: the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) found widespread concern and low confidence in NHI security posture, and Aembit’s 2024 report shows many teams still rely on manual secrets handling and lack parity between user IAM and non-human IAM.
Why IAM Resilience Matters
Traditional IAM focuses on access control and governance.
But when identities themselves fail, governance isn’t enough.
You need IAM resilience—the ability to absorb disruption, recover quickly, and ensure continuity.
Resilience rests on three principles:
- Backups of identity configurations, policies, and assignments.
- Recovery to restore services after failures or attacks.
- Continuity to keep operations running with minimal disruption.
Without these, NHI fragility becomes a single point of failure.
Backup and Recovery: The Hidden Lifeline
Backup isn’t glamorous. Yet for NHI, it’s essential.
- Imagine an update deletes a core service account.
- Or ransomware wipes your groups and app connections.
- Or an outage disables your primary identity tenant.
In each case, IAM backup and recovery is the only safety net.
Acsense applies the 3-2-1 rule—multiple copies, in different locations, with immutability—to IAM data.
This transforms fragile NHI infrastructures into recoverable systems.
Acsense’s Perspective on IAM Resilience
At Acsense, we see IAM resilience as insurance for identity continuity.
- Continuous backups protect every identity change, human or non human.
- One-click recovery ensures rapid restoration—often in ~10 minutes.
- Posture intelligence helps validate configurations and highlight risks.
We don’t eliminate NHI fragility. But we ensure that when things break—because they will—you can recover.
That’s the resilience layer missing in most IAM strategies.
Regulatory and Compliance Drivers
It’s not just risk—it’s regulation.
- NIST CSF 2.0 (PR.DS-11) calls for tested backups.
- DORA and NIS2 require recovery and continuity for digital services.
- APRA CPS 230 emphasizes operational resilience, including IAM.
Auditors don’t just want logs—they want proof that identity configurations can be restored.
Best Practices for Building NHI Resilience
- Inventory NHI: Map all service accounts and machine identities.
- Backup configurations: Automate backups of policies, apps, and groups.
- Test recovery: Run DR exercises to validate continuity.
- Segment risk: Avoid overprivileged NHI; enforce least privilege.
Integrate with compliance: Generate on-demand reports for auditors.
Conclusion: From Fragility to Resilience
The rise of non human identities is inevitable. Their fragility isn’t.
By embedding IAM backup and recovery into your strategy, you transform NHI from a weak link into a resilient layer of your infrastructure.
With Acsense, you gain resilience, continuity, and compliance—not just for today’s users, but for the expanding universe of machine identities.
