You’ve secured the humans. Now what about the other 70% of your identity surface?

Identity management has always felt straightforward, at least on paper. You create user accounts, grant access based on roles, and deactivate credentials when people move on. But reality isn't that tidy. In large organisations, the complexity of managing identities at scale becomes painfully apparent…particularly when you look beyond just human users.

Every organisation SPG has worked with tends to have human identity governance relatively under control. They might complain about manual processes, periodic certifications, or compliance audits, but broadly, they know where people sit and what they can access.

However, the real operational pain often lives just beneath the surface. It's in the machine identities that quietly multiply, unmanaged and unnoticed. These are your service accounts, scripts, bots, APIs, certificates, and keys - identities created swiftly to keep systems running but rarely monitored or properly governed.

The scale of this issue is often underestimated. Research highlights that machine identities now frequently outnumber human identities by a staggering ratio, sometimes as much as 45:1. Organisations might have hundreds of employees but tens of thousands of machine identities. And most alarmingly, many teams don't even know these identities exist.

Why does this matter? Unmanaged machine identities are a significant security vulnerability. Service accounts with overly broad permissions can be exploited, neglected certificates can expire and cause outages, and compromised APIs or bots become attack vectors. It's not just theoretical; major breaches have been traced directly back to poorly managed machine identities.

Operationally, the consequences are clear. Without governance, no one is sure who created these identities or what they're used for. Audits turn into crises, access reviews become guesswork, and security teams struggle to close vulnerabilities. In short, it's a governance nightmare.

So, what's the solution?

Leading organisations are now recognising that identity management must become holistic. Platforms like that offered by our partner, Saviynt, are championing this approach by converging governance of human and machine identities into a single identity fabric. This isn't about managing just one type of user - it's about seeing identity governance as a cohesive practice across the entire organisation.

Saviynt, for instance, brings visibility and policy-driven governance to all identities, regardless of type. It automates the lifecycle management of service accounts, ensures certificates and keys are renewed and revoked when necessary, and integrates risk assessment directly into access control workflows. It's practical, operationally grounded governance that goes beyond theory to what actually works in complex environments.

Organisations that embrace this converged approach not only improve security posture but significantly reduce audit overhead. Auditors see clear trails, managers gain visibility, and security teams finally gain control.

It's not complicated - but it's also not easy. The challenge lies in confronting the uncomfortable truth: machine identities are just as critical to security and compliance as human ones. And governance that ignores them is governance incomplete.

The reality is that you can't achieve true zero-trust security until you properly manage the identities you aren't actively thinking about. That includes every script, API, bot, or account that currently sits unmanaged in your environment.

So, perhaps it's time to ask yourself - and your team - one critical question: Do you genuinely know where every machine identity is today, who owns it, and what it's accessing?

If the answer is anything other than a confident yes, it's time to rethink your identity governance strategy - and fast.