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Leadership Brief

Managing Non-Human Identities

April 09, 2020

Warwick Ashford

As digital transformation gains momentum, new types of digital identity are emerging and growing rapidly. Identity management has traditionally focused on human identities, but non-human identities are proliferating and must not be overlooked. This Leadership Brief looks at the importance of managing non-human and human identities in the same way, and how to approach achieving that.

1 Executive Summary

In the digital era, IT is becoming increasingly service-oriented, cloud-based and supported by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. As a result, there has been a rapid growth in digital interactions between people, processes and things. Each of these actors or entities has an identity, and it is essential for organizations to be able to manage those identities and control what resources they can interact with for business, security, privacy and compliance reasons. While organizations are familiar with managing and controlling access for human identities, the rapidly
growing number of non-human identities is a relatively new phenomenon and therefore managing these identities is fairly unfamiliar territory. Consequently, there is little or no support for managing non-human identities it in traditional identity and access management (IAM) applications, processes and approaches. This Leadership Brief looks at the types of non-human identities emerging in business IT environments and how enterprises could manage them in the same way as human identities by using a services-based approach.