Think about how your organization governs human domain admin. There's a named person, a business justification, an approval workflow, session oversight, and a periodic access review. If that person leaves, access is revoked the same day.  Now think about the service account running your backup jobs, the token your CI/ CD pipeline uses to deploy production, or the cloud role attached to your data platform. Those identities often hold equal or greater privilege. Most have none of that governance.  CyberArk's 2025 research puts machine identities at 82 for every human identity. It also found that 88% of organizations still define only human identities as "privileged users." The accounts with some of the most sensitive accesses are the ones outside the privileged-access conversation.  This post makes one argument: non-human identities are privileged identities, and the gap that matters is governance, not technology. We'll look at what that gap looks like in an attack, compare how privileged humans and privileged machines are governed today, and set out the controls that close it. 

A Familiar Attack Path

Consider a pattern defenders see repeatedly. An attacker phishes an employee. The employee isn't a domain admin, but a service account within reach is. That account can read a production database, write to a backup share, and hold a token that opens a cloud storage bucket.  Nobody owns the account. Nobody has reviewed its access in years. Nothing flags its use as unusual. Within hours, a phishing incident becomes a ransomware event.  The attacker never had to defeat MFA or break strong control. They found an identity that nobody was accountable for. Credentials are central to this pattern, and Verizon's 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report found that stolen credentials appeared in almost one-third of breaches over the past 10 years. 

Two Privileged Accounts, Two Standards 

A non-human identity (NHI) is any digital identity assigned to a machine, service, or automated process rather than a person. That covers service accounts, API keys and tokens, cloud and Kubernetes workload identities, pipeline secrets, and machine certificates. Many hold privileged access, and most aren't treated that way. 
Governance control  Privileged human account  Privileged machine account 
Named owner  Always  Often missing 
Business justification  Required at approval  Rarely documented 
Approval to create  Formal workflow  Created ad hoc by the developer or platform team 
Access review  Periodic recertification  Usually excluded from reviews 
Credential rotation  Enforced  Often static for years 
Activity oversight  Session monitoring and audit trail  Limited, and hard to attribute 
Offboarding  Triggered by the HR leaver process  No trigger. The identity outlives its creator 
  Each row is a governance control, not a technical one. The tools to vault, rotate, and monitor exist. What's missing is the accountability that makes someone use them.  Where AI agents fit. When an AI agent uses a privileged machine account, the ownership question gets harder: who is accountable for what the agent does with that access? We'll cover agent governance in a dedicated post. 

Bringing Human-Grade Governance to Machine Accounts 

You don't need a separate program for machines. You need to apply the discipline you already use for privileged humans.  Name an owner for every NHI. An accountable person or team and documented business justification. No owner is a candidate for deprovisioning. Enforce this at creation time so the backlog stops growing.  Classify by what the identity can reach. A token that reads a marketing database is a different risk class from one that deploys production code. Classification tells you where to start, because you can't review everything at once.  Make privileged machine access go through the same approval path. Standing, broad access should have to be justified and, where possible, replaced with short-lived credentials issued for the task.  Recertify on a schedule. Owners attest that each NHI still needs to exist and still needs the access it holds. This is the control that catches orphans, unused entitlements, and drift.  Keep an audit trail you can attribute. Every privileged machine action should trace back to an identity, an owner, and a purpose. Shared accounts that hide the human behind an action are an audit gap.  These controls echo into what auditors already expect for privileged access, and they give your board a concrete way to see progress. Useful measures include the percentage of NHIs with a named owner, the number dormant for 90 days or more, and the time taken to revoke an identity once its owner leaves. 

How ARCON Can Help 

Closing the gap in the table above means giving privileged machine accounts the same ownership, approval, and review that privileged humans already have. ARCON is building NHI governance around that idea: a clear record of who owns each non-human identity and why it exists, secrets vault that keeps privileged credentials controlled and rotated, and workload IAM that ties machine access to a purpose rather than leaving it standing. 

The Takeaway 

The question to take to your next security review isn't "do we have a tool for machine identities." It is "who owns each privileged machine account, and when did they last confirm it's still needed?" If your team can't answer that, the gap isn't technology. It's governance.  Audit-ready, always, including for the identities that never log in like a human.