Applications, scripts, pipelines, containers, and cloud workloads all need credentials to call APIs, read data, and deploy changes. Machine identities commonly outnumber human ones in enterprise environments, and they typically carry high privilege, weak rotation, sparse ownership records, and no offboarding when the service is retired.
Key points
InventoryEnumerate service accounts, keys, certificates, and tokens; assign each an owner, purpose, scope, and expiry.
Platform-native identityCloud managed identities and workload-identity federation remove stored secrets where possible; where secrets must exist, vault and rotate them.
Important limitationNHI security is a lifecycle problem, not a vault problem. Storing a key safely does not fix excessive permissions, unknown usage, missing owners, or credentials that never expire.