BeyondTrust launches Pathfinder NHI Governance, extending privileged access control to the non-human and AI identities that run modern environments
BeyondTrust has announced NHI Governance, a new solution on the Pathfinder platform that governs non-human identities across cloud, SaaS, endpoints, and on-premises environments. As service accounts, API keys, workload identities, AI agents, and other non-human identities continue to grow across enterprise environments, BeyondTrust has extended its governance capabilities to help organizations manage and secure these identities, which now outnumber employees in many organizations.
Service accounts, API keys, OAuth clients, workload identities, and AI agents now hold most of the standing privilege in the enterprise, and they outnumber the people. According to BeyondTrust Phantom Labs research, non-human identities already vastly outnumber human ones, with enterprise AI agents growing more than 460% year over year. Almost none are ever assigned an owner; their privileges are rarely reviewed, attested, or rightsized; and their credentials are seldom rotated or retired. They are granted access on the day they are created and often retain that access indefinitely, says BeyondTrust.
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“Seeing non-human identities was only half the equation,” said Marc Maiffret, Chief Technology Officer, BeyondTrust. “The other half is doing something about the privilege they carry at scale: deciding who owns each one, pulling back the privilege they aren’t using, and retiring the ones that should not exist. And doing so without requiring teams to address them one by one with the limited time they have. That’s not paperwork you bolt onto a tool built for employee onboarding. That’s managing non-human identities at machine scale.”
NHI Governance: Helping Customers Move from an Inventory List to Real Control
According to BeyondTrust, NHI Governance is built to execute the non-human equivalent of joiner, mover, leaver actions that actually reduce risk, in the right order:
- Establish ownership. Every non-human identity is assigned to a person or a team who is accountable for it, so nothing runs unowned.
- Enforce least privilege. Lock down the identities that hold real privilege, and constrain what each one can reach, closing the paths to privilege it was never meant to have.
- Decommission NHIs. Retire the stale, orphaned, and abandoned identities that make up most of the ungoverned population, so the attack surface shrinks instead of growing unchecked.
- Secure AI Agents. Bring them under the same controls, with their own credentials and their own access.
BeyondTrust said it has been helping organizations manage privileged access for more than two decades. With NHI Governance, the company extends these capabilities to non-human identities by adding lifecycle governance, ownership, and least-privilege controls to help reduce identity-based risks.
The solution is part of the BeyondTrust Pathfinder platform and brings identity discovery, governance, and enforcement together in a single platform.
Availability
NHI Governance is planned for US general availability in Fall 2026, with other global regions to follow.
