The ROI of NHI security: Why investing in machine identity protection pays off

When business leaders think about cybersecurity, they often picture stolen user passwords or hacked servers. But there’s another rising risk that lurks in every enterprise: non-human identities (NHIs) – the service accounts, API tokens, bots, and machine credentials that connect our digital systems. These machine identities may not clock in at 9 AM, but they now outnumber human users by as much as 50 to 1 in many organizations​. Every one of them can access valuable data or services. If compromised, they effectively are the keys to the kingdom in the hands of an attacker. This makes unsecured NHIs not just a technical oversight, but a full-blown business liability.

Recent research underscores the scope of the issue. In a 2024 survey by the Cloud Security Alliance, 1 in 5 organizations reported a security incident related to non-human identities – yet only 15% of companies felt confident in their ability to secure those machine identities​. In other words, the majority know they have a problem, but lack assurance that it’s under control. Each unmanaged service account or hard-coded credential is a potential breach waiting to happen, an invisible threat that can bypass traditional security oversight. Enterprise leaders need to reframe these risks as direct business threats: an unsecured machine identity isn’t just an IT problem, it’s a ticking time bomb that can trigger downtime, compliance failures, and multi-million-dollar losses.

In this article, we dive deep into the risks associated with NHIs, the cost of not securing them, and how to approach a solution that is policy-based, and future-proof.

Table of contents

1. Breaches that exposed the true cost of NHI risks
2. Compliance risks of unmanaged NHIs
3. The cost of inaction vs. the cost of actio
4. ROI contributor 1: Risk reduction
5. ROI contributor 2: Operational efficiency and developer velocity
6. Unifying policy enforcement
7. Conclusion: Security investment as a business enabler

 

Breaches that exposed the true cost of NHI risks

If the risk of machine identity abuse still feels abstract, recent high-profile breaches provide hard-hitting reality checks. Real incidents at respected tech companies have shown how lapses in NHI security lead straight to financial and reputational damage.

CircleCI (Jan 2023) - CircleCI, a popular CI/CD platform, suffered a breach that started with a single engineer’s laptop. Malware on that device stole an active session token, giving attackers the same access as the employee. From there, the intruders generated production API tokens and exfiltrated customers’ secrets and encryption keys without being detected. In response, CircleCI had to invalidate and rotate essentially all customer tokens and keys to contain the fallout. Consider the cost: days of all-hands-on-deck incident response, emergency communications urging every client to reset credentials, and untold reputational harm. This breach, stemming from one compromised machine credential, joins a series of recent attacks where API keys and access tokens were used to leapfrog into companies’ core environments.

Okta (Oct 2023) - Identity provider Okta revealed that attackers gained unauthorized access to its customer support system by exploiting a leaked service account credential. The password for a support account (which lacked MFA) was unwittingly saved to an employee’s personal cloud storage, where attackers found it. With that one machine identity, the threat actor was able to view support tickets and files from 134 Okta customers.They even used stolen session tokens from those files to attempt follow-on attacks on at least five client organizations. Beyond the immediate incident clean-up, Okta faced intense scrutiny from customers (including Cloudflare and 1Password) and spent weeks managing the crisis. The root cause - a single over-privileged service account with weak governance - became a case study in how NHI exposures can cascade into multi-party breaches​.

Slack/GitHub (Dec 2022) - Over the holidays, Slack discovered that hackers had stolen a limited number of Slack employee tokens and used them to access the company’s private code repositories on GitHub​. Thankfully, no customer data or critical production systems were directly affected. But the attackers did manage to download Slack’s private source code. The incident forced Slack to invalidate credentials, double-check its entire integration pipeline, and likely invest in further securing how its software tools exchange data. It was a wake-up call that even at a tech-savvy firm, API tokens and developer credentials must be guarded as carefully as user passwords. Slack’s breach may have been contained, but it highlighted how programmatic access can be a soft underbelly for otherwise secure organizations.

Each of these examples carries a clear lesson: when machine identities go unmanaged, the business pays the price. What might start as an “IT issue” - an API key checked into code, an orphaned account lingering after a project - can swiftly become a board-level crisis. These breaches led to customer churn, incident response costs, and erosion of trust. They also illustrate that no company is immune: if industry leaders like Okta and Slack can be hit due to NHI weaknesses, others undoubtedly are at risk. Importantly, these weren’t attacks on flawed encryption or zero-day system holes - they were abuses of valid credentials and permissions. In the absence of strong machine identity protections, attackers essentially walked in through the front door using the company’s own keys.

Compliance risks of unmanaged NHIs

Beyond the headline-making breaches, failing to govern non-human identities creates silent compliance and legal risks. Security frameworks and regulations today demand rigorous control over all identities - human and machine. Organizations that fall short could face stiff penalties or lost business opportunities.

Consider common standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001: both require strict access controls, audit trails, and regular reviews of accounts/credentials. An unmanaged service account that never expires or an API key with broad access and no oversight can easily put you out of compliance. For example, SOC 2’s security principles mandate controlling logical access to systems, which includes service accounts, and auditing their use. An auditor finding hard-coded credentials in source code or unable to determine who owns a particular machine account would flag a major gap. Similarly, ISO 27001’s Annex controls, such as A.9 on access management, call for least privilege and secure key management – exactly what weak NHI practices violate. In short, compliance gaps often start with machines. It’s hard to claim you have “effective identity and access management” if dozens of non-human identities are flying under the radar.

New regulations are raising the stakes even higher. The EU’s NIS2 Directive, which came into force in 2023, explicitly requires organizations to implement identity and access management measures, including for service accounts and automation. The cost of non-compliance can be substantial - NIS2 allows fines up to €10 million or 2% of global turnover for serious cybersecurity lapses​. Regulatory bodies recognize that an unsecured machine identity could be the weak link that attackers exploit, so they expect companies to manage them with the same diligence as human logins. There’s also GDPR to consider: while aimed at personal data protection, a breach via a machine credential that exposes personal data would trigger GDPR enforcement, with fines up to 4% of annual revenue. Meanwhile, sector-specific rules, like PCI-DSS for payment systems or the emerging U.S. cybersecurity requirements for critical infrastructure, increasingly highlight service account security and secret management as compliance must-haves.

Ignoring NHI security isn’t just a technical risk, it’s a compliance minefield. Companies could face legal penalties, fail audits, or lose key certifications needed to do business. Even when regulators don’t catch it, business customers might - enterprise clients often vet their suppliers’ security practices. If you can’t demonstrate control over machine identities during a vendor risk assessment, you could easily lose a deal. On the flip side, organizations that invest in machine identity protection often find audit preparation becomes easier - with an automated inventory, you can instantly answer “Which service accounts have access to this data?” and prove that all credentials are rotated and monitored. Reducing this audit burden and avoiding compliance pitfalls is a significant, if somewhat hidden, part of the ROI of NHI security.

The cost of inaction vs. the cost of action

For executives weighing budgets, it often comes down to numbers: what does doing nothing cost us, and what would proactive investment save us? When it comes to NHI security, the cost of not acting can be astronomical, while the cost of action, though not trivial, is relatively modest by comparison.

A single incident can incur direct expenses in the millions, whereas funding preventive measures is a fraction of that. According to IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach report, breaches initiated by stolen or compromised credentials cost organizations $4.62 million on average​. That figure includes incident response, downtime, lost business, and recovery per breach. And remember, that’s an average; many breaches, especially of enterprise data, cost far more. Now compare this to the typical cost of implementing a machine identity management solution or an authorization platform for services - often on the order of low six figures annually for a large enterprise, or even less for mid-size firms. The math is compelling: The price of one serious credential-related breach can be 10x or more than the annual cost of a comprehensive NHI security program.

It’s not just the direct breach costs. Inaction brings a slew of other expenses and risks that, while harder to quantify, are very real:

If a machine credential is abused, your security team might spend weeks in investigation and containment mode, pulling developers off their regular work to rotate secrets and patch integrations (as happened in the CircleCI case). The internal labor cost and productivity loss from a major incident can be huge - imagine dozens of engineers focusing on emergency response for a month.

A breach that exposes data or disrupts services can trigger fines under laws like NIS2 or GDPR. For instance, GDPR fines have reached into the tens of millions of euros in some cases. Even preparing the mandatory notifications and dealing with regulators requires costly legal counsel and compliance consulting.

A loss of customer trust, though harder to put on a balance sheet, can translate to revenue loss. After a publicized breach, enterprises often have to spend more on marketing or customer retention campaigns, and sales cycles get longer as prospective clients raise security concerns. In extreme cases, the business lost from reputational fallout can dwarf the immediate breach response costs.

Day to day, without proper NHI tooling, your engineers and IT staff are likely spending an excessive amount of time on manual work - chasing down unknown service accounts, writing ad-hoc scripts to rotate API keys, managing exceptions for one-off integrations. This is all time not spent on strategic projects. The status quo of manual credential management is essentially a hidden tax on your IT operations.

Now consider the cost of proactive investment: this typically involves purchasing or subscribing to an NHI security platform, and dedicating some resources to integrate and maintain it. Let’s say an enterprise spends on a platform that provides machine identity discovery, credential vaulting, and policy enforcement. Add to that the staff hours to operationalize it (perhaps a part of an engineer’s time). You might be looking at a total in the hundreds of thousands per year for a robust solution - significant, but orders of magnitude lower than the multi-million dollar hit of a breach. Moreover, this spend is predictable and budgetable, whereas breach costs are sudden and unbounded.

To put the comparison in perspective, the table below contrasts the status quo costs of inaction with the costs and savings of a proper NHI security program:

Table: Estimated cost factors – “Inaction vs. Proactive Protection.”* The left column outlines potential costs if machine identities remain unmanaged (a major breach, fines, heavy manual labor, etc.), while the right column shows the outcomes after investing in NHI security (avoided incidents and penalties, streamlined workload, plus the platform’s fee). In this scenario, the proactive approach’s annual spend is perhaps $100K, but it averts a multi-million dollar breach and significantly cuts down manual effort. Even if one assumes a breach might only happen once every few years, the expected value of loss prevented far exceeds the investment. Simply put, the ROI here can be measured in avoided crises and saved hours. For most enterprises, it’s like an insurance policy that actually improves efficiency day-to-day.

ROI contributor #1: Risk reduction (avoiding breach costs and fines)

The most immediate and quantifiable return on investing in machine identity protection is risk reduction - i.e. avoiding the massive costs that a security incident would entail. Cyber risk can be thought of in probabilistic terms: even if you can’t guarantee preventing every breach, reducing the likelihood or impact of an incident has real economic value. For example, if a company judges there is a 25% chance per year of a serious breach via a compromised machine credential and that a breach would cost roughly $4M, then the annualized risk is $1M. An investment of, say, $200K that largely mitigates that risk could be seen as yielding a 5x “return” (avoiding $1M in expected loss for $200K in cost) – a simplistic calculation, but illustrative of the scale.

How does NHI security reduce risk in practice? First, by preventing incidents: a dedicated machine identity management solution can eliminate many of the common causes of credential-related breaches. It ensures things like credential rotation, continuous monitoring of service account behavior to catch misuse, and strict enforcement of least privilege so a leaked token can’t access everything. By closing these gaps, it shrinks the attack surface adversaries can exploit. Fewer openings mean a lower probability of a costly incident.

Second, good NHI security provides early detection and response. If something does go wrong, say an API key starts being used from an unusual location, the right tools can flag it immediately. Containing a breach early can hugely limit the damage, which correlates to cost. IBM’s data shows that breaches taking longer than 200 days to identify cost millions more than those stopped quickly. Machine identity protection often includes automated alerts for anomalous usage, meaning you might catch an intrusion long before it spreads. It’s akin to having a sprinkler system for fires - even if a spark lands, it won’t rage into a 5-alarm blaze.

Another angle of risk reduction is avoiding regulatory fines and legal costs. By staying on top of machine identity security, you inherently maintain compliance with the likes of SOC 2, ISO27001, GDPR, and NIS2. You’re far less likely to suffer a reportable breach of personal data or to fail an audit on security controls. This avoidance of penalties is part of the ROI. For example, an ISO27001-certified posture on service account management not only avoids fines but can be a business enabler, letting you close deals with security-conscious customers faster. In essence, investing in NHI security upfront is far cheaper than paying for non-compliance. As one EU compliance guide notes, noncompliance with NIS2 could mean millions in fines that dwarf the cost of simply implementing the required controls.

Finally, improved risk posture can lead to better cyber insurance premiums. Insurers are starting to scrutinize how companies manage things like privileged accounts and credentials. Showing that you have machine identity protection in place might reduce your cyber insurance costs or increase the coverage available – another financial benefit that goes straight to the bottom line.

It’s important for decision-makers to view these security investments as more than an “expense.” They are loss-prevention mechanisms. Just as factories invest in safety gear to avoid costly workplace accidents, modern enterprises invest in NHI security to avoid multi-million dollar cyber accidents. The ROI is often realized the moment a single incident is thwarted or mitigated – a potentially company-ending bullet dodged thanks to foresight.

ROI contributor #2: Operational efficiency and developer velocity

The financial benefits of machine identity protection aren’t only in the breaches you avoid – they’re also in the day-to-day savings and productivity gains you achieve by managing NHIs efficiently. This is an often underappreciated aspect: a good NHI security program not only makes you safer, it can make your teams faster and more effective.

One major contributor is the automation of manual processes. Without specialized tooling, managing machine identities is extremely tedious. Inventorying all your service accounts across cloud platforms, rotating keys regularly, and disabling tokens when systems are decommissioned – doing these by hand is error-prone and eats up valuable staff time. According to one security platform vendor, tasks like building an inventory of NHIs, analyzing their risk, and offboarding credentials can take weeks if done manually. When those tasks are automated, IT and security teams reclaim that time for higher-value work. Astrix, for example, emphasizes that by automating NHI discovery, credential management, and offboarding, organizations see significant cost savings and better resource allocation. Instead of chasing down orphan accounts, your team can focus on improving defenses and enabling new business initiatives. The reduction in human error is another bonus – automation means fewer things falling through the cracks, like a forgotten credential that should have been revoked.

Streamlined operations also extend to developers and engineers. In many companies, app developers end up implementing auth logic for service-to-service communication as one-off solutions - writing code to handle API tokens or building custom permission checks within each microservice. This repetitive effort is essentially reinventing the wheel (and sometimes poorly). By adopting a centralized approach to machine identity and authorization, you free developers from having to be security experts every time they integrate with another service. Policies can be defined once and enforced everywhere, which is far more efficient.

A good example is Cerbos, an authorization solution for fine-grained access control. Rather than each engineering team crafting its own NHI-access rules in code, they can offload that to Cerbos’s policy engine. This means less engineering time spent on custom authorization logic and much easier policy changes, since you update authorization policies in one place. In fact, Cerbos allows teams to reuse the same authorization implementation for both users and services, avoiding duplicate effort and inconsistencies. When a new microservice comes online, developers can simply assign it the appropriate non-human identity and policies, rather than building an authZ module from scratch. This greatly improves developer velocity because teams can roll out new integrations or features without getting bogged down in access control plumbing.

Centralizing machine identity management also speeds up audits and reduces administrative overhead. Instead of pulling data from dozens of systems to answer “who (or what) had access to this?”, you can generate reports in minutes. Improved visibility means less time fighting fires caused by unknown credentials - your ops folks aren’t scrambling when someone suddenly discovers an AWS key that no one owns. As one ROI calculator might frame it, every hour of engineering saved is money saved. If an NHI security platform saves even 400 hours of staff time a year (about 10 hours a week), that’s easily $40–50K in labor value (assuming fully loaded cost of ~$100/hour for skilled staff). Many organizations save far more time by eliminating the need for custom scripts and manual reviews.

There’s also an innovation angle: with robust machine identity security in place, organizations can adopt new technologies faster. For example, if your company wants to embrace more automation or utilize AI agents (which act as non-human identities), knowing you have a governance framework for those identities means you can proceed without undue delay. The security team won’t be a bottleneck, saying “no” to integrations because they lack oversight. Instead, they can confidently say “yes, go ahead” because the proper guardrails (policies, monitoring, audit logs) are already there. This accelerates time-to-market for new services and partnerships, directly impacting revenue. We often forget that security enables speed when done right - it’s the difference between quickly plugging in a new API vs. spending months on risk assessments.

In summary, the operational lift from investing in NHI security comes from working smarter, not harder. You reduce the “toil” work for your teams, ensure consistency which lowers the chance of mistakes that cause incidents, and let developers focus on building product features rather than building security mechanisms. When calculating ROI, these efficiency gains translate to real dollars saved (fewer contractor hours, less rework, smaller headcount needed to manage the same environment, etc.). Combined with risk reduction, it paints a compelling picture: the investment not only pays for itself, it can actually fuel growth by freeing resources and speeding up projects.

Unifying policy enforcement: How solutions like Cerbos boost security and speed

Maximizing the ROI of machine identity protection often comes down to choosing the right tools and architectures. Simply buying a “magic box” isn’t enough; you want solutions that integrate well and amplify both security and productivity. This is where centralized policy solutions such as Cerbos come into play, especially for securing service-to-service authorization.

Cerbos is an example of an authorization solution that provides a policy decision point (PDP) for your applications and services. Rather than each service deciding on its own what it can do, they ask Cerbos, which applies a consistent set of policies. Why is this relevant for NHI security? Because it centralizes and standardizes the enforcement of rules for your machine identities. In a distributed microservice architecture, you might have hundreds of non-human principals (microservices, bots, scripts) talking to each other. Managing who/what is allowed to access which API or perform which action can become a spaghetti mess if done ad hoc by each team. A solution like Cerbos lets you define those access rules in one place, using a high-level policy language, and then have all services adhere to them uniformly.

From a security posture standpoint, this means no more gaps between services. That extra layer of authorization control ensures, for example, that Service A can only read data from Service B, but not write or delete, unless explicitly permitted. Even if someone somehow steals Service A’s credentials, they can’t abuse them beyond what’s allowed. This addresses the “overprivileged NHI” problem – a major cause of incidents. By enforcing least privilege across all inter-service interactions, Cerbos helps contain what any one machine identity can do, reducing blast radius. Giving each service a distinct identity tied to specific permissions becomes a powerful security control and helps with compliance, such as SOC 2 and ISO requirements. Essentially, Cerbos acts as a preventative measure so that even valid credentials are only used in approved ways. It’s the policy guardrail that complements your identity management.

From an efficiency viewpoint, using a unified authorization service means faster changes and onboarding. Suppose a new regulation or business requirement comes along that requires changing who or which roles can access a certain type of data. Without a central PDP, you’d have to update the code or configuration file of many services individually - a time-consuming and error-prone process. With Cerbos, you update one policy file and all relevant services immediately enforce the new rule. This agility is incredibly valuable. It means your organization can respond quickly to audits (“we need to restrict these accounts now”) or incident lessons learned (“after that near-miss, tighten these permissions”) without pulling developers into a massive refactoring.

Moreover, by externalizing authorization, Cerbos frees teams from needing to implement the underlying authorization infrastructure themselves. This mirrors the general principle of externalizing security from core application logic, which is recommended in zero-trust architectures. Developers simply call Cerbos to ask, “Is token X allowed to do Y on resource Z?” and build features accordingly. The result is not only less dev effort, but also more consistent logging and auditing of those decisions. Security teams get a centralized audit trail of all authorization checks, which is useful for demonstrating compliance and investigating incidents, instead of hunting through each service’s logs.

In practice, pairing a machine identity management platform that handles the credentials, discovery, and rotation side of things, with a policy enforcement platform like Cerbos that handles the authorization decisions, gives you a robust end-to-end NHI security solution. The machine identity platform ensures you know what identities exist and that their secrets are managed safely. The authorization platform ensures that those identities can only take actions consistent with your corporate policy. Together, they significantly improve your security posture and make life easier for your engineering teams. It’s a true win-win: stronger protection and less friction in development.

For example, if Acme Corp adopts these tools, their security team can sleep easier knowing every API key or service account is inventoried, scoped appropriately, and monitored - and at the same time, developers can spin up new services or integrations without lengthy security reviews because the guardrails are already in place. The company moves faster, but safely. That’s exactly the kind of synergy that justifies the investment to business leadership.

Conclusion: Security investment as a business enabler

Investing in NHI security is far more than an insurance policy against unlikely events – it’s a strategic move that pays off in tangible ways. We’ve seen that the cost of doing nothing (or doing too little) can be devastating: multi-million dollar breaches, regulatory fines, customer distrust, and countless hours wasted on firefighting. On the flip side, a proactive approach to machine identity protection yields a strong ROI by preventing those losses and streamlining operations. It’s the classic ounce of prevention worth a pound (or several million dollars) of cure.

For executive decision-makers, the calculus should be straightforward. Dollars spent on shoring up NHI security translate to dollars (and headaches) saved down the line. More importantly, they translate to a more agile and resilient business. When your machine-to-machine interactions are secure by design, your organization can embrace digital transformation – cloud services, AI automation, DevOps workflows – without fear that automation will become your Achilles heel. In this way, NHI security investments enable the business to move faster and innovate more confidently. It removes a significant barrier to growth (“Can we integrate with that platform safely?” – Yes, we can because our non-human identity program has it covered).

The narrative around security spending often frames it as a cost center, but in the area of machine identity, it’s time to flip that script. The ability to prevent a breach that could cost half your annual profit is obviously a financial win. But beyond avoidance, maturing your NHI security is a competitive advantage. It means you’re less likely to be knocked off-course by incidents, more likely to pass customer security vetting (thus winning deals), and able to adopt new tech quickly. Your engineers aren’t tangled up in security snafus, so they deliver product features faster than competitors. All of this contributes to the bottom line in ways that may not be line-itemized on a balance sheet, but are very real.

In closing, machine identity protection pays off because it addresses a fundamental risk of modern business while unlocking efficiencies across teams. As the CIO or CISO, presenting the ROI of NHI security to the board might involve pointing to avoided breach statistics, regulatory requirements, and case studies like Okta or CircleCI as cautionary tales. But just as crucial is emphasizing that these investments help the organization build trust and momentum. In an era where automation and interconnectivity define success, having a robust non-human identity security framework is what allows you to scale confidently. It turns security from a roadblock into a road paver for digital initiatives. The next time budget season comes around, the question shouldn’t be “Can we afford to invest in machine identity security?” but rather “Can we afford not to?”

Learn more about securing NHIs with Cerbos.

If you’re interested in implementing externalized authorization - try out Cerbos Hub or book a call with a Cerbos engineer to see how our solution can help streamline access control in your applications.