Machine Identities and the Governance Gap
Commvault, Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026
Organizations face a governance gap managing machine identities, which now outnumber human identities but lack proper visibility and controls.
Machine identities-applications, services, APIs, and automated workloads-have become central to modern systems but are often governed less rigorously than human identities, creating security blind spots.
Traditional identity management models focused on people no longer apply, as machine identities are dynamically created, persist indefinitely, and frequently hold excessive privileges without audit. The core challenge is visibility: most organizations lack clarity on how many machine identities exist, what permissions they hold, and how they interconnect across systems.
Without understanding these patterns first, attempts to restrict access can become reactive and disruptive to business operations. Organizations should begin by building visibility into their machine identity landscape and establishing accountability by mapping human users to machine identities for auditability purposes.