Entro Security, a global leader and pioneer of the industry’s first Non-Human Identity (NHI) and Secrets Management platform, released its first ever forecast of cybersecurity trends for 2025, authored by CEO and co-founder, Itzik Alvas. Backed by Entro Security Labs, the research division of Entro Security, these insights highlight key trends and challenges that CISOs must prepare for in the coming year, offering a roadmap for navigating the future cyber threat landscape.

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The Explosion of Non-Human Identities

Currently, non-human identities, including API keys, service accounts and cloud tokens outnumber human identities by 92 to 1 in enterprise environments. This is according to Entro’s research report “2025 State of Non-Human Identities and Secrets in Cybersecurity,” released in September 2024. Entro’s Lab found that NHIs will continue to scale exponentially in 2025 as modern organizations increasingly adopt automation and cloud services. These NHIs are fundamental in modern digital operations, yet they represent a growing security blind spot.

“NHIs are often overlooked in the cybersecurity landscape, however, they play a critical role in cloud operations, SaaS integrations and development pipelines,” said Itzik Alvas, co-founder and CEO of Entro Security. “Their exponential growth, combined with insufficient management practices, makes them a prime target for attackers. CISOs must prioritize NHI lifecycle management as a strategic initiative and investment in 2025.”

AI’s Growing Role in Securing Secrets and Non-Human Identities

As the number of NHIs increases, traditional security measures will no longer suffice. AI will become essential in managing secrets and non-human identities by enabling advanced detection of potential vulnerabilities and misuse. These NHIs are often undetected but are critical to secure, especially in automated and cloud-based environments.

AI tools will be used to predict and prevent unauthorized access to these sensitive machine identities by monitoring usage patterns and flagging any anomalous behavior. AI will continuously monitor the access patterns of an API key used by a microservice and immediately alert security teams if it begins making requests from unusual locations or in unexpected sequences, which indicate a compromise.

AI Will Revolutionize Identity and Access Management (IAM)

AI will play a significant role in the evolution of identity security, moving from traditional access controls to more dynamic and context-aware models. AI-driven systems will analyze behavior patterns to determine access rights in real time. For instance, AI will revoke access to an employee if it detects anomalous behavior, even if that employee’s credentials haven’t been stolen outright, based on real-time analysis of their actions.

The Growing Need for NHI Lifecycle Management

As NHIs proliferate, the complexity of managing them will become a growing concern for organizations and CISOs. It will become essential for enterprises to adopt NHI lifecycle management solutions to protect their security operations. Organizations that invest in continuous discovery, real-time inventory, automated lifecycle management and anomaly detection will be better positioned to defend against emerging threats.

“In a world where NHIs outnumber human identities, managing their lifecycle and securing digital identities will be one of the most pressing challenges in cybersecurity,” said Alvas. “This year, we’ve already seen several high-profile breaches attributed to insecure machine identities. In 2025, failure to properly manage these identities could have serious consequences for businesses and their customers.”

Zero-Trust Becomes a Necessity for NHIs

Zero-trust architecture (ZTA) will remain the gold standard for enterprise security and will evolve to address the unique challenges posed by NHIs. Entro Security emphasizes that applying ZTA for NHIs will require enterprises to take inventory of all their organizations’ identities. Once discovered, organizations must implement strong IAM solutions along with strict access controls, continuous authentication and granular permissions. Maintain strong encryption, use secure protocols and regularly rotate secrets for all your NHIs.

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