Securing non-human identities: Lessons from SailPoint's Customer Zero approach

Machine credentials are multiplying faster than security teams can track them. API keys, tokens, and service account secrets now power the automations, and AI agents running modern enterprises, vastly outnumbering human identities. Yet, they often remain invisible to standard security sweeps, creating a massive blind spot.

With the acquisition of Entro Security, SailPoint brings deep machine discovery and autonomous AI agents under enterprise-grade governance. SailPoint Entro adds runtime defense, lineage mapping, and discovery for over 1,200 credential types. To see this in practice, SailPoint rigorously tested the technology within its own environment through a "Customer Zero" approach, leveraging internal IT and security infrastructure to prove the platform's effectiveness before bringing it to market.

Why non-human identities are a top priority

Compromised tokens and unrotated credentials give attackers a quiet path to sensitive systems. SailPoint views this as a critical enterprise priority, recognizing that many modern vulnerabilities and attacks stem directly from compromised secrets.

The urgency grows as enterprises deploy more AI and automation. While traditional tools effectively manage human identities, machine credentials often slip through the cracks. This creates dual risks: security exposure from untracked credentials waiting to be exploited, and compliance gaps from the inability to prove proper governance post-incident. Organizations are racing to deploy AI agents and automation to drive business efficiency. But every new agent introduces a new set of API keys. Enterprises cannot scale their AI strategy safely without first establishing robust NHI governance as a foundational prerequisite.

Deep discovery: From scanning to lineage mapping

SailPoint Entro goes beyond simply finding secrets; it correlates them directly to people and business processes. It traces exactly which application, script, or agent is using a specific secret at any moment.

Through this approach, if a non-human identity is associated with a departed employee, security teams can now correlate and track that relationship historically. This level of deep-dive correlation provides structural visibility that was previously impossible to achieve, closing a major operational blind spot. Beyond security, mapping this lineage allows organizations to systematically clear out technical debt. It empowers teams to confidently identify and decommission orphan integrations and legacy 'unmanaged' credentials that no longer serve a business purpose, ensuring a cleaner, optimized architectural footprint.

Risk ranking and actionable remediation

Finding hidden keys is only the first step. SailPoint Entro categorizes findings by risk level, offering two distinct paths for remediation:

• One-touch remediation: An easy resolution for routine, recurring issues.
• AI-guided remediation: Intelligent guidance for complex issues requiring a more nuanced process.

By surfacing a 360-degree view and ranking risk, SailPoint’s internal rollout demonstrated an estimated 50 percent improvement in the operational management of secrets and their associated risks. By consolidating these capabilities, organizations reduce engineering time wasted on manual key rotation, lower the volume of security-related operational tickets, and eliminate the need for overlapping point-solutions.

The Customer Zero philosophy

SailPoint operates on a core Customer Zero principle: never ask customers to trust a solution that hasn't been strictly proven on internal data first. By stress-testing the Entro technology internally, SailPoint validated the platform in measurable ways.

When connected to ten non-production developer code repositories to surface embedded secrets, the platform outperformed other widely used scanning tools. This internal testing proved the platform's efficacy in uncovering embedded code secrets, prioritizing them by risk, correlating them back to human coders, and surfacing everything in a single pane of glass.

Crucially, this real-world validation proved we could achieve this deep visibility without introducing friction to developer pipelines. For any enterprise, this is the holy grail: robust governance that protects the organization while keeping software delivery and developer velocity at its peak. This real-world validation is essential, allowing SailPoint to share an authentic, live success story backed by its own operational metrics.

Closing the gap in identity security

SailPoint excels in human accountability and governance. Entro complements this by operating deep within developer environments to secure granular secrets. Together, they pair a unified identity graph with proactive runtime defense that monitors token behavior and intercepts malicious AI tool calls in real time.

Ultimately, this unified approach closes a critical gap in secret and token management, providing enterprises with a complete picture of discovery, identification, rotation, and ongoing governance. Furthermore, having unified governance over both human and non-human identities radically simplifies compliance and audit readiness. Instead of pulling fragmented reports from various developer vaults, organizations can provide auditors and cyber insurers with a single, unified identity graph showing end-to-end lineage.

Key takeaways

• Secrets are a top attack vector: They require the exact same governance rigor as human identities.
• Visibility must be historical: Correlating non-human identities back to people closes long-standing blind spots.
• Governance accelerates AI and Developer Velocity: Security must enable the business. Frictionless secrets management is a prerequisite for scaling enterprise AI and maintaining fast release cycles.
• Remediation beats discovery: Risk-based prioritization and guided fixes turn findings into decisive action.
• Proof matters: Validating solutions internally builds absolute deployment confidence.

Non-human identities aren't slowing down, and neither is the risk they carry. If your team is grappling with hidden machine credentials and secrets sprawl, start by mapping where those credentials live and what they connect to. Comprehensive NHI discovery and remediation is the practical next step toward staying ahead of risk.

Learn more about SailPoint Entro: https://www.sailpoint.com/products/agentic-ai-security