Your quick guide to securing non-human identities

The rise of automation and cloud adoption has pushed non-human identities into almost every layer of the enterprise.

What began as background service accounts now includes automated workloads, integrations, and AI-powered systems that initiate actions, access data, and interact across services without direct human input.

Yet, while organisations secure human users with multi-factor authentication (MFA) and password policies, non-human identities are often neglected.

This oversight leaves them vulnerable to weak credentials, outdated protocols, and privileged access, making them prime targets for attackers and a compliance risk.

In this article, we explore the risks and share advice on securing non-human identities as part of your overall identity and access management (IAM) strategy.

The growing risk of non-human identities

Non-human (workload) identities exist throughout IT environments, and tend to vastly outnumber their human counterparts, in some cases by as much as 100:1.

AI-enabled workloads and automation platforms can assume permissions, chain access, and act autonomously, often with limited visibility or oversight.

Combined with inconsistent management, this introduces several well-established risks:

• Identity sprawl: Unmanaged identities become easy targets.
• Weak security: Basic credentials lack protections like MFA.
• Legacy protocols: Outdated systems, such as those using SMTP, create security gaps.
• Autonomous behaviour: Automated and AI-driven workloads can initiate access and actions independently, amplifying the impact of misconfiguration.

These risks are amplified by the elevated privileges often associated with non-human identities.

When privileged non-human identities are compromised, attackers can move laterally at speed, leading to:

• Expanded attack surface: Unsecured accounts bypass human-focused controls.
• Compliance breaches: Regulations like CAF demand proper identity management, including non-human accounts.
• Operational disruption: Breached IoT devices, automated systems, or AI-driven processes can cause outages or enable DDoS attacks.

Now, as AI systems become more agentic, identity management is having to adapt.

Some workloads no longer just execute instructions, they assist, decide, and act with a degree of autonomy, often across multiple systems.

Microsoft Entra is responding by treating these agents as first-class identities, with clear ownership, scoped permissions, lifecycle limits, and full auditability.

The intent is to extend familiar controls such as Conditional Access, ID Protection, and identity governance workflows to AI agents, recognising that they are now part of the identity fabric and need to be governed like any other identity in the environment.

How to secure non-human identities

Understanding the risks is one thing. But what can we do to mitigate them?

In this section we offer some steps you can take by utilising the tools available within the Microsoft ecosystem.

1. Audit of machine authentication

Initial audit steps

Begin by auditing existing machine identities, authentication methods, and, increasingly important, agent identities.

Microsoft Entra sign-in logs:

• Use these logs to identify service accounts and workload users. Ideally service accounts would be prefixed with something like ‘svc’, but this isn’t always the case. Filtering and pattern analysis is critical for identifying accounts with higher risks.
• Look for detailed records of authentication attempts to understand account activity and usage.
• Filter by non-interactive sign-ins, legacy authentication, or single-factor authentication to uncover vulnerable accounts.
• Detect unusual access patterns that may indicate security risks.

It’s also worth noting that some apps and services may be stale or unused, and could be due for removal.

Roles and Administrators in Microsoft Entra ID:

• Review privileged roles and the accounts assigned to them.
• Ensure that accounts in these roles comply with multi-factor authentication (MFA) requirements.
• Identify any privileged accounts that may disrupt services when MFA is enforced.

Discover unmanaged devices

Use Microsoft Defender for IoT to:

• Identify unmanaged devices on your network that may not be part of your current identity management framework.
• Gain visibility into all connected devices and their security status.

Service principal access reviews

Conduct access reviews to:

• Detect machine identities already running as service principals.
• Apply further controls, such as Conditional Access, to these accounts.

Microsoft Entra recommendations

• Remove unused applications: This will show up if your tenant has applications not used for more than 90 days.
• Remove unused credentials from apps: This will be highlighted if a credential has not been used for more than 30 days.

Please note that service principal access reviews and Entra recommendations require Workload ID Premium licensing, an important consideration when planning your approach.

Discover permissions and privilege usage across environments

As organisations operate across cloud platforms and SaaS services, visibility into effective permissions is essential. Use native Microsoft Entra governance features, Azure RBAC insights, Defender for Cloud, and SIEM-driven analysis to:

• Understand assigned versus exercised permissions
• Identify overprivileged non-human identities
• Detect rapid permission expansion in automated and AI-driven workloads

2. Best practice management of non-human identities

Once you have identified the machine and agent identities requiring protection, implement secure authentication and management practices.

Remove unused accounts

• Using insights from Entra recommendations tidy up and remove any unused applications or services.

Identity management

Service principals act as the local representation of a global application object within a tenant.

• Authenticate using either:
  • Client secrets (not recommended): Functionally similar to passwords so not secure nor recommended.
  • Certificates (recommended): These provide stronger security by eliminating reusable passwords.

Managed identities:

• A specialised type of service principal designed for Azure resources.
• Managed identities remove the need to manage credentials, enabling secure, automatic authentication to Microsoft Entra-protected resources.

Permission remediation

• Use Entra access reviews, entitlement management, and Azure RBAC insights to right-size roles based on actual usage.
• Remove unused permissions and credentials.
• Reassess access more frequently for automated and AI-driven workloads that exhibit burst or unpredictable behaviour.

Conditional Access and advanced controls

Implement Conditional Access policies to:

• Define trusted locations.
• Leverage user and sign-in risk analysis using Microsoft Entra ID Protection.
• Please note: Workload ID Premium licensing (PUPM model above M365 E5) is needed for advanced Conditional Access controls.

Continuous monitoring

• Monitor Entra recommendations for any new alerts.
• Use Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and Microsoft Sentinel to detect anomalous behaviour, unexpected access paths, and privilege escalation.
• Correlate sign-in telemetry with workload activity to identify behavioural drift in non-human identities.
• Use Defender for IoT to continue to assess devices.

By using managed identities or service principals, the risks associated with leaked credentials or password spray attacks are significantly reduced. Security is further bolstered through the addition of Conditional Access.

3. Dealing with unsupported services (your plan B)

For services that cannot use managed identities or service principals, fallback strategies are required:

Traditional user accounts:

• Lock down accounts with Conditional Access policies, such as specific IP address restrictions.
• Monitor and alert on activity using tools like Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps and a SIEM such as Microsoft Sentinel.

Encouraging modern authentication:

• Work with vendors to adopt updated authentication methods that support secure integrations.
• Ensure company IAM policies mandate that any new services meet these requirements.

Final thoughts

A lot is spoken of identity management as the bedrock of modern security strategies. Organisations therefore need to remember that this means all identities, not just the human ones.

Non-human identities play a large and vital role in modern IT systems, enabling automation, innovation, and increasingly AI-driven decision-making.

As assistive and autonomous agents become more embedded in day-to-day operations, these identities are no longer just executing tasks in the background. They are actively shaping how systems behave and interact.

But without robust security measures they have the potential to pose serious weak spots in your security posture.

That’s why we advocate a strategy built on strong auditing through Microsoft Entra, native identity governance controls, and security monitoring tools such as Defender and Sentinel, alongside advanced protections like Conditional Access and ID Protection. This approach ensures that human, machine, and AI-driven identities are governed consistently, proportionately, and with clear limits on authority.

Of course, we appreciate that busy IT teams are all too often overworked and under-resourced. Or maybe unsure of exactly where and how to get started.

That’s what we’re here to help with. So please do get in touch and find out how we can help ensure your human and non-human identities are working securely and productively.

Non-human identities: Common questions

Next steps

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