As innovation in identity security evolves by the day, so does the attack surface. Nothing is growing faster than cloud-based non-human identities (NHIs).
These machine identities are growing at a staggering rate. They run critical workloads, automated processes, and cloud-native applications, and in most organizations, they now outnumber human identities 50 to 1. While they are critical to keeping operations running, they are also one of the biggest security blind spots in an organization’s cloud identity security stack.
Most organizations have limited visibility into how many NHIs exist in their cloud environment, what they can access, where they reside, and who manages them. These machine identities are regularly created on the fly, left untracked, and operate with long-lived credentials and overprivileged access, making them prime targets for compromise.
There is no standard onboarding process, offboarding rarely occurs, and ownership is unclear at best, leaving accountability completely absent from the process. As a consequence, orphaned and unmanaged NHIs silently accumulate, expanding the attack surface and providing low-hanging fruit for attackers.
In this post, we will unpack the different blind spots and risks associated with cloud NHIs before exploring the key ways you can resolve them with our newly expanded cloud NHI security capabilities.
Cloud NHI blind spots: What you can’t see will hurt you
When organizations fail to properly manage and monitor cloud NHIs, they create critical security blind spots that are easy to overlook but challenging to defend. These identities often slip through the cracks because they aren’t tied to a human owner, despite retaining persistent access to critical systems, services, and data.
Without clear visibility into the details of each NHI and their activities, why they’re created, and what level of access they hold, organizations lose control over a rapidly growing and less visible layer of their cloud environment. Over time, unmanaged NHIs accumulate unchecked, expanding the attack surface and introducing hidden pathways for attackers to exploit. These blind spots aren’t just oversights; they are structural weaknesses in your cloud security posture.
What is the most critical security blind spots organizations face with cloud NHIs?
- Discovery gaps
Limited visibility and inability to detect the full range of NHIs operating across cloud environments.
- Regularly abused
Poor misconfigurations and long-lived credentials allow access far beyond their intended use, creating unnecessary exposure.
- Overprivileged access
NHIs are often granted excessive permissions by default, making them highly privileged and risky if compromised.
- Complex lifecycle
With no clear ownership or governance, credentials are often not rotated or break applications when changed, while offboarding is not managed properly.
Silverfort’s NHI Security: Full coverage of cloud NHIs
For years, Silverfort has been the industry leader in securing on-prem Active Directory (AD) service accounts, providing deep visibility and control for some of the world’s most security-conscious enterprises. Now, we are bringing that same level of depth and precision to the cloud.
Silverfort enables you to automatically discover and classify all types of NHIs across cloud identity providers, infrastructures, and SaaS applications, so all identities and access paths are identified and continuously monitored.
With Silverfort’s NHI Security, organizations gain full visibility into the effective privileges of every cloud NHI, uncovering excessive or unnecessary access that could pose a security risk. By continuously analyzing privilege levels across cloud environments, organizations can now easily identify and prioritize critical exposures and reduce their overall attack surface.
In addition, Silverfort helps close lifecycle and ownership gaps by mapping each NHI to a responsible owner and delivering actionable recommendations for remediation. This enables security teams to reduce risk, enforce accountability, and strengthen their overall security posture.
Silverfort uses a three-step approach to securing cloud NHIs:
- Discover and classify the different types of NHIs
- Prioritize the most critical exposures
- Remediate lifecycle and security gaps
Discover and classify
The first step in properly managing and protecting all non-human identities is knowing exactly where they reside. Here are several key questions to ask:
- What NHIs do you have?
- What do they access?
- Where do they reside and who manages them?
Once you integrate your cloud identity providers, infrastructure, or SaaS applications with Silverfort, the platform automatically identifies all cloud NHIs in your environment. This provides complete visibility into your NHI inventory. Silverfort’s ability to map NHIs by source, destination, privilege level, and security posture enables the platform to automatically identify and accurately categorize them across your cloud environment.
The variety of NHI types is classified by Silverfort into seven categories:
- Access keys: Long-lived credentials allowing programmatic access for users or NHIs to access services and resources.
- Service accounts: A dedicated identity used by applications, services, or workloads to interact with other services and systems securely, operating in a single environment or set of resources.
- IAM roles: An AWS identity assigned to a workload or user, allowing specific actions on defined resources in a system. IAM roles are not tied to specific entities and can be assumed dynamically by authorized entities, providing temporary permissions, often via identity federation or delegation.
- Tokens: Temporary credentials dynamically generated, typically as part of the authentication process. Tokens are often scoped for a specific set of permissions and are less prone to long-term security risks.
- Applications: Identities representing software systems, functioning as clients or servers in a distributed architecture. Applications are registered in IAM platforms to define how they authenticate, authorize users, integrate with other applications and services, and what actions they can perform.
- Certificates: Digital documents used to establish identity, encrypt communication, and enable secure authentication. Certificates include a public key, a private key (secret), and metadata such as expiration and issuer.
- Secrets: Sensitive data, such as passwords, API keys, or private configuration details, used to access services or authenticate users and applications. Secrets are often static string values requiring secure storage and management to prevent unauthorized access.
By discovering and classifying every type of NHI, you seamlessly gain end-to-end visibility into your entire NHI inventory—including each identity’s name, privilege level, security posture, and the sources and destinations it interacts with. This comprehensive visibility empowers you to prioritize high-risk identities, reduce exposure, and take targeted, confident action to strengthen your cloud security posture.
Prioritize
With detailed insights into every cloud NHI in your environment—including privilege levels, usage patterns, ownership, and overall security posture—you can get a clear understanding of where security gaps and exposures exist, making it easy to shift from reactive guesswork to informed, proactive decisions. With these insights at your fingertips, you can focus on the highest-risk NHIs, cutting through the noise and zeroing in on what truly matters.
Silverfort makes it easy to prioritize NHIs based on risk level, considering factors like privilege scope, behavioral patterns, and exposure. You can also filter identities by ownership, to quickly identify which teams or users are responsible for mismanaged accounts, empowering targeted remediation and driving accountability across the organization.
With complete visibility into your cloud NHI landscape, Silverfort automatically analyzes privilege levels, access patterns, and behavioral signals to surface the most critical exposures, so you can take action. By identifying overprivileged, misconfigured, or orphaned NHIs, Silverfort enables you to prioritize what matters most, eliminate unnecessary access, and quickly close high-risk security gaps.
Through our real-time risk analysis, organizations can:
- Identify posture gaps by uncovering exposures in identity systems and processes, helping you detect weaknesses before they are exploited.
- Assess risk and prioritize remediation by focusing on the NHIs and security gaps that pose the greatest threat to your environment.
- Reduce your attack surface by remediating misconfigurations and excessive privileges, cutting down the number of exploitable entry points for attackers.
Within the NHI detail view, Silverfort delivers rich context and intuitive visualizations that reveal how and where each identity is configured. You can access key metadata directly from the connected cloud platform, including last activity, assigned roles, creator, and more. This enables you to gain a clear view into an NHI’s effective privileges and actual usage, helping you assess associated security risks.
With this visibility, you can quickly identify exposures, understand their impact, and take focused, informed steps to investigate and remediate them with confidence.
Remediation
Now that you know where to prioritize and mitigate risk, having effective remediation is what truly closes the exposures and risks loop. Silverfort provides dynamic and customized step-by-step guidance tailored to each specific exposure, so teams can resolve issues quickly and with confidence.
Silverfort surfaces context-aware remediation paths based on the nature and severity of each risk. Depending on the exposure, recommendations may include code snippets, smart suggestions, or multiple resolution alternatives that fit seamlessly into your existing workflows. Whether you are reducing excessive privileges or assigning ownership to orphaned accounts, every step is clear, relevant, and actionable.
By turning visibility into action, Silverfort helps you remediate both security and lifecycle gaps—strengthening your cloud NHI environment and reducing your exposure with confidence.
Learn more about Silverfort’s Cloud NHI Security
With Silverfort’s expanded cloud NHI protection capabilities, organizations gain full visibility and control over one of the fastest-growing identity risks in the cloud. By automating the discovery, classification, and analysis of NHIs across IdPs, infrastructure, and SaaS platforms, Silverfort surfaces critical exposures and effective privileges, so you can act with precision.
Through prioritized risk insights, targeted remediation, and clear ownership mapping, Silverfort helps close visibility gaps, reduce the cloud attack surface, and apply consistent security controls, with the same trusted depth we have delivered for on-prem environments.
Learn more about Silverfort’s NHI security product here.