Non-Human Identity Software
an independent guide to NHI security software
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How Many Non-Human Identities Do You Actually Have?

An estimate based on your environment, not an industry average

"NHIs outnumber humans 10:1" — or 20:1, or 50:1, depending on which vendor's report you read. Those figures describe someone else's environment. This calculator estimates yours: enter a few counts from your own infrastructure, and adjust the assumptions below if you have better numbers than the defaults.

Your environment

Rough counts are fine — this is an estimate, not an audit.

Human employees with system accessEngineering, IT, and anyone with credentials to internal systems
Applications / microservicesEach one typically holds its own credentials
Cloud accounts / projectsAWS accounts, GCP projects, Azure subscriptions — combined
CI/CD pipelinesBuild and deployment pipelines with their own credentials
SaaS integrationsThird-party apps connected via OAuth — Slack, Salesforce, M365, etc.
Assumptions (adjust if you have better numbers)

These multipliers are illustrative starting points based on common patterns in cloud-native environments — not measurements of your environment specifically. If you've run a discovery scan or pulled numbers from your cloud console, replace these with your own.

NHIs per application/microserviceDatabase service accounts, API keys for dependencies, deployment tokens
NHIs per cloud account/projectIAM roles, service accounts, instance profiles, function execution roles
NHIs per CI/CD pipelineBuild credentials, deployment tokens
NHIs per SaaS integrationThe integration's own service identity, plus any sub-connections it creates
Your estimated ratio
9.6 : 1
~4,800 estimated non-human identities for 500 human employees

Where the estimate comes from

Source Count × Multiplier ≈ NHIs

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