Taming the Machine Mayhem: 5 Steps to Kickstart Your ISPM Program

Organizations are standardizing on agentic AI to move faster. Under the hood, every agent runs on non-human identities (NHIs): service accounts, tokens, and API keys that request access and execute work. The numbers tell the story: CyberArk's 2025 research reveals that machine identities now outnumber humans by more than 80 to 1 and security leaders expect up to 150% growth in the next year.

In practice, that looks like sprawl. Service accounts you can’t trace. API keys that never rotate. Tokens and certificates everywhere.Perhaps most concerning is CyberArk's finding that "the race to embed AI into environments has inadvertently created a new set of identity security risks." A full 68% of organizations lack proper identity security controls for AI.

Taming this machine mayhem is precisely what an Identity Security & Privileged Management (ISPM) program is designed to do. Think of ISPM as the strategy that brings order to the chaos of machine identities. But before you can dive into the trenches, you need a plan for the plan.

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Step 0: Plan the Plan (Because Every Good Plan Needs a Prequel)

Let's be honest, every great endeavor starts with a bit of "pre-planning." It's the part where you stare at the messy garage, decide which corner to tackle first, and figure out what "clean" actually means. In the world of ISPM, this is where you define your goals.

Before you write a single line of code or deactivate a single token, you have to know what you’re trying to achieve. Are you aiming to pass an audit? Reduce the risk of a breach from a leaked API key? Or simply get a clear picture of every machine identity in your environment?

Defining your goal is Step 0 because it’s not a practical step, it’s the philosophical one. It’s the map you draw before the treasure hunt begins. So, grab a whiteboard, assemble your team, and answer the big questions first. With your "why" established, you can move on to the "how."

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Step 1: Discover and Inventory Every Identity

You can't protect what you can't see. The first practical step is to turn on the lights and find every single human and NHI across all your environments (cloud, on-prem, and hybrid). This means locating:

• Service Accounts: For applications and services.
• API Keys & Tokens: For authenticating to APIs.
• Secrets: Database credentials, passwords, and other sensitive data.
• Certificates: For securing communications.

This discovery phase gives you a complete inventory, which is the foundation of your entire ISPM program.

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Step 2: Assess Your Risks and Set the Rules

Once you have your inventory, it's time to figure out where the biggest dangers are lurking. This is your risk assessment phase. Look for common but critical issues like:

• Overprivileged access: Identities with far more permissions than they need.
• Unrotated secrets: Credentials that haven't been changed in months (or years!).
• Stale identities: Accounts for services or employees that are no longer active.
• Shared credentials: The same secret being used by multiple applications.
• The AI Wildcard - Agentic and Local AI Access: This is a new and chaotic frontier. Agentic AI models can act autonomously, requesting access and using credentials in unpredictable ways. Even more challenging is the rise of local AI usage, where developers run models on their own machines, completely outside of security’s view. Managing the credentials used in these "shadow AI" scenarios can be nearly impossible without a centralized ISPM strategy.

Based on your findings, you can establish clear policies. For example, you might create rules that enforce mandatory 90-day secret rotation or prohibit service accounts from having administrative privileges. Your policies should also begin to address AI usage, setting guidelines on how and where models can be run and what data they can access.

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Step 3: Secure and Remediate Initial Findings

Now for the cleanup. With your risks identified and rules in place, it’s time for immediate, practical action. This step is about tackling the most urgent problems you discovered in Step 2. Your remediation checklist should include:

• Deactivating all stale or dormant accounts.
• Rotating old, vulnerable secrets and keys immediately.
• Applying the principle of least privilege by stripping away excessive permissions.
• Resolving shared credential issues by provisioning unique identities for each service.

This is the most satisfying step—it’s where you actively reduce your attack surface and make your environment measurably safer before moving on to automation.

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Step 4: Automate Everything You Can

Manual management of machine identities is a losing battle. The only way to keep up with the scale and speed of modern IT is through automation. In this step, you codify the rules you created and automate their enforcement. Key automation goals include:

• Automated Credential Rotation: Ensure secrets are changed automatically according to your policy.
• Just-in-Time Access: Grant temporary, auto-expiring privileges to identities only when they are needed.
• CI/CD Pipeline Integration: Embed security directly into your development lifecycle to prevent new risks from being introduced.

Automation not only improves security but also frees up your team to focus on more strategic initiatives instead of manual, repetitive tasks.

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Step 5: Monitor, Measure, and Stay Vigilant

An ISPM program is not a "set it and forget it" project. It's a continuous cycle of improvement. This final step is all about ongoing vigilance:

• Track Key Metrics: How many unmanaged NHIs do you have? Are you compliant with rotation policies?
• Watch for Anomalies: Monitor for unusual activity that could signal a breach, like an API key suddenly being used from a new geographic region.
• Revisit and Update: Regularly review your policies and adapt them as your organization and tech stack evolve.

Think of monitoring like flossing. It isn’t the most glamorous part of your day, but you’ll really regret it if you skip it.

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Your First Steps to Sanity

Launching an ISPM program doesn't have to be overwhelming. By focusing on these practical steps, you can build a solid foundation. The most important thing is simply to start. NHIs aren't going away; they're multiplying. The sooner you start managing them, the sooner you can reduce risk and empower your teams to innovate safely.

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Want deeper skills in Non-Human Identity and agentic AI? Take the NHI Fundamentals certification.