Organizations have spent decades refining how they manage human identities. We've built onboarding flows, role-based access models, and certification processes around how people work. But when it comes to machine identities—service accounts, application programming interface (API) keys, bots, and more—those same best practices fall apart.
And it's not just a theoretical problem. The volume and criticality of machine identities have exploded. Many enterprises now have 10x more machine identities than human ones—and most remain poorly governed, if at all. Treating them like just another user account doesn’t work.
Traditional identity playbooks weren’t designed for machines
Human identity governance assumes a predictable lifecycle: hire → role change → termination. Machines don’t follow that script. They spin up automatically, scale across hybrid environments, and often perform high-privilege tasks on their own. Despite this, many organizations still:
- Use manual spreadsheets to track service accounts and credentials.
- Store secrets in scripts or app configs, often hardcoded and long-lived.
- Rely on perimeter-based security, trusting anything already inside the network.
- Extend human-focused identity and access management (IAM) tools to machine accounts with minimal adaptation.
These legacy approaches create silos, inefficiencies, and security gaps that only grow as machine identities multiply.
Where traditional methods fall short
Let’s take a closer look at the most common outdated practices and why they fail in the age of automation:
1. Manual tracking and outdated repositories
Machine accounts, Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates, API keys, and secrets are often tracked in informal ways—via spreadsheets, SharePoint folders, or outdated repositories. These systems:
- Don’t scale as machines spin up and down dynamically
- Create blind spots that lead to orphaned accounts
- Leave expired or exposed credentials unnoticed
The outcome? Missed renewals, security gaps, and hours of work chasing down ownership when audits come around.
2. Long-lived secrets and hardcoded credentials
Many organizations still use static credentials for service accounts and APIs—some valid for years. Worse, these secrets are:
- Hardcoded into scripts or application code
- Rarely rotated
- Accessible to too many people or systems
Once exposed, these credentials offer attackers persistent access to critical systems. And since they’re hard to trace, it can take weeks to detect the compromise.
3. Perimeter-based security and implicit trust
Traditional security strategies assumed that if a user or machine was inside the firewall, it could be trusted. But in modern cloud and hybrid environments, that model breaks:
- Machines run outside the traditional perimeter
- Lateral movement inside the network is easy once access is gained
- Zero trust principles (verify everything, least privilege always) are rarely applied to machine identities
The result? A single compromised service account can provide unfettered access across systems, with little to no monitoring in place.
4. Using IAM tools designed solely for humans
Traditional IAM tools are critical for managing human identities. But without adaptation, they often struggle to meet the scale, speed, and complexity required for machine identity governance. When applied to machines, these tools often hit a wall:
- Machines don’t have job titles or departments
- Their “roles” change, depending on automation needs
- Human workflows (like manager approvals) don’t apply
So instead of governance, you get complexity—and a growing list of machine accounts with unclear ownership, access, and purpose.
Real-world scenario: When a forgotten machine account becomes a breach vector
Consider this: A retail company uses an internal analytics platform that connects to a central database through a service account. That account was created five years ago by a developer who no longer works at the company. It’s never been reviewed, rotated, or tied to a current owner.
An attacker compromises a different part of the network through a phishing attack. Once inside, they discover the service account, which has persistent, elevated access to customer data.
Because the account was unmanaged:
- It wasn’t being monitored.
- No one was assigned to maintain or review its permissions.
- Its credentials had never been rotated.
The attacker exfiltrates customer records undetected. The breach costs the company millions in regulatory fines and reputational damage—and it all started with a single machine identity that had fallen through the cracks.
These types of incidents are happening across industries. It's how real attacks unfold—and why 83% of enterprises reported at least one machine account takeover in the last year.
What’s really needed to protect machine identities?
To break free from outdated methods, organizations need to adopt a modern machine identity governance strategy. One that’s purpose-built for machines, not people.
That means moving toward:
- Automated discovery and classification – Find every machine account across your environments, including cloud, on-prem, and hybrid systems.
- Ownership assignment – Tie every machine identity to a responsible human owner or application group for accountability.
- Lifecycle management – Govern provisioning, access changes, and decommissioning with clear policies and automation.
- Least privilege enforcement – Apply role-appropriate permissions, avoiding overprivileged accounts that create risk.
- Regular access reviews – Certify access regularly, ensuring permissions remain accurate as systems evolve.
- Credential hygiene – Automate rotation, enforce expiration policies, and eliminate hardcoded or static secrets.
How SailPoint Machine Identity Security helps
SailPoint Machine Identity Security (MIS) was built to solve these problems. Rather than retrofitting human IAM tools for machine use cases, MIS provides:
- Centralized visibility into all machine identities—across service accounts, bots, robotic process automations (RPAs), APIs, and more
- Automated discovery and classification of unmanaged accounts
- Ownership assignment for accountability and audit-readiness
- Lifecycle governance to ensure machine identities don’t linger unmonitored
- Policy enforcement and certification workflows that reduce manual effort
All of this is powered by SailPoint Identity Security Cloud and built on the Atlas platform—ensuring that machine identity governance is unified with your broader identity security strategy.
Want to explore further?
👉 Read Part 1: What is a machine identity?
👉 Read Part 2: The evolution of identity: A historical outlook on machine identities
