How to Manage Identity Sprawl in the Age of AI Agents and NHIs

Non-human identities (NHIs) and AI Agents including service accounts, CI/CD credentials and cloud workload identities, now eclipse human identities in enterprise identity systems by 50:1 to 100:1. Modern identity security platforms must assign identities to these assets and furthermore, apply roles, access control policies, visibility and governance in order to secure the modern enterprise.

As AI agents and automation scale across cloud, CI/CD and SaaS environments, bots, service accounts and workload identities multiply faster than security teams can inventory and govern them, driving identity sprawl. This is often paired with secrets sprawl, as API keys, tokens and certificates proliferate without clear ownership or rotation, creating more privileged access paths with excessive permissions and limited visibility.

In this blog, we’ll break down why identity sprawl is accelerating, the security and compliance risks it creates and how organizations can bring it under control with an identity security and governance platform like Keeper.

Why identity sprawl is growing

AI agents are often built to execute, not sit in a queue waiting for someone to click “approve.” Give one a goal like “provision a new environment,” and it will start doing the work: spinning up cloud resources, calling APIs, kicking off CI/CD jobs, pulling from repos, querying databases and checking settings in admin consoles. But to move that fast, it needs machine-to-machine access, which usually means creating (or reusing) service accounts, workload identities, cloud roles, certificates and other NHIs.

That’s where identity sprawl creeps in. Human and non-human identities spread across tools and platforms faster than teams can assign clear ownership, apply consistent controls or revoke access once the job is done.

The risks of identity sprawl

As NHIs multiply, privileged access gets distributed across pipelines, cloud roles, integrations and scripts, often without consistent ownership or expiration. That creates more ways for attackers to get in, move laterally and escalate privileges, and it makes audits and investigations harder than they need to be.

Most issues show up in a few predictable patterns:

• Service accounts get created for a project or workload, then get orphaned when ownership changes. Keys and tokens stay active because no one is responsible for retiring them.
• Automation is often overprovisioned to avoid failures, then those permissions persist long after the job finishes. Standing privilege quietly becomes the default.
• Shared credentials and hard-coded secrets in code, configuration files and pipelines make access difficult to trace and easy to reuse.
• When an agent or automation touches sensitive systems, teams struggle to answer basic questions like what it accessed, what it changed and why it had that level of access.

Those technical failures turn into real operational risk fast:

• Credential theft enables lateral movement and makes privilege escalation easier because long-lived secrets and standing permissions give attackers time and room to expand access.
• Incident response slows down when ownership is unclear and access paths are fragmented across tools, teams and environments.
• Audit readiness suffers when approvals are inconsistent and evidence is incomplete, especially when you can’t produce clear logs or session activity tied to a specific identity.

How Keeper helps reduce identity sprawl

Reducing identity sprawl is not about chasing every new identity as it appears. It’s about changing the system so privileged access is governed consistently, even when the number of identities increases. Here’s how Keeper can help:

1. Centralized privileged access control

When privileged access is scattered across cloud consoles, CI tools, jump boxes and shared secrets, you can’t see the full picture. Centralizing privileged access workflows helps you answer the basics quickly:

• Which identities have privileged access?
• Where do they authenticate?
• Who approved access and for how long?
• What happened during the session?

KeeperPAM^® centralizes privileged access to servers, databases, web apps and more across cloud and on-prem environments, with built-in support for protocols like SSH, RDP, VNC, HTTPS and common databases.

2. Enforces least privilege with time-bound access

Standing privilege is one of the biggest drivers of identity sprawl. AI agents and other NHIs tend to run continuously, and teams often grant broad permissions to avoid breaking automations. Over time, those “temporary” permissions turn into permanent access paths no one revisits.

KeeperPAM helps you move to just-in-time access and reduce standing privilege by allowing access to resources to be time-limited. When the approved window ends, access is automatically revoked, so privileges do not quietly persist long after the task is complete.

3. Avoids exposing credentials whenever possible

To let AI agents do their jobs, teams often provide them with secrets like API keys or tokens. Those secrets spread fast, and that’s when identity sprawl becomes dangerous.

KeeperPAM reduces that exposure by brokering privileged access for both people and AI-driven automation. With remote privileged sessions, users and agents never touch the underlying credentials or SSH keys. Instead of distributing secrets across humans, agents and workloads, access is routed through the platform, so credentials stay protected, and every action stays visible and auditable.

4. Automate rotation and lifecycle management

Even strong detection does not fix the underlying problem if leaked secrets stay valid. The longer a credential lives, the more likely it is to be reused, copied and forgotten, especially when NHIs are created for short-lived workloads, but the secrets behind them are long-lived. GitGuardian reports that 70% of secrets exposed in public repositories in 2022 are still valid today, which points to a rotation and remediation gap.

KeeperPAM supports automated credential rotation so privileged credentials do not remain static. This shortens the window of exposure and reduces the risk that one leaked credential becomes a durable access path.

5. Capture session activity and logs for accountability and audits

If an AI agent or automation pipeline touches a sensitive system, you need evidence.

KeeperPAM provides session recording and playback for privileged access sessions. Remote sessions can record screen and keyboard activity across protocols, including SSH, RDP, VNC, database sessions and web browser sessions, creating consistent evidence even in hybrid environments.

For compliance and incident response, KeeperPAM pairs recordings with detailed logs and automated reporting to help you quickly answer audit questions like who initiated access, when it occurred, which resource was accessed and what activity took place. KeeperAI provides encrypted summaries of activities and automatically terminates high-risk sessions. Events can also be logged to major Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms, which helps correlate privileged session activity with alerts from endpoint, cloud and network tooling.

Bring identity sprawl under control

AI agents are accelerating automation across the enterprise, and they’re also accelerating the creation of NHIs such as service accounts, workload identities, cloud roles and certificates — and the secrets those identities use, such as API keys and tokens. When those identities grow faster than governance, privileged access spreads, standing permissions persist and security teams lose visibility into what was accessed and why. 

KeeperPAM helps bring identity sprawl under control by centralizing privileged access, enforcing time-limited least privilege, reducing credential exposure and capturing audit-ready session evidence. 

Request a demo to see how KeeperPAM can help bring identity sprawl under control.