A category needs
a language.
We authored these terms so the industry could stop using the wrong ones. Each is owned, defined, and offered to the NHIG Standard.
NHID™
The unique X.509 cryptographic credential every non-human carries, bound to a named accountable human owner. A person carries a passport. A non-human carries an NHID. NHI names the entity; NHID names its credential.
Machine Speed
The tempo at which non-human identity operations must occur. Certificates issued, rotated, and revoked in seconds-to-minutes, not days-to-weeks. The dividing line between a governance-native platform and a ticket-based IAM.
Silent Expiry
The moment a certificate expires without notice, without alert, without a human in the loop. Production authority evaporates at the edge of a clock.
Orphaned Identity
A non-human identity holding active privilege with no named owner. A rotation policy cannot rotate what it cannot address.
Rogue Identity
A non-human operating outside governance: no certificate binding, no rotation schedule, no revocation path. Present in every enterprise. Visible in none of them until the inventory is honest.
Governed Estate
The inventory of non-human identities under cryptographic control: continuously scored, lifecycle-bound, and attested. The opposite of the shadow estate you already have.
Governance Gap
The distance between identity deployment velocity and identity governance coverage. Every non-human you ship without Lifecycle Authority widens it.
Identity Lifecycle Debt
The accumulated liability of every identity you deployed and never governed. Quantifiable. Enterprise-owned. Non-optional.
Identity Bootstrap
Provisioning a governed identity at deploy time: before the first API call, before the first secret, before the first audit gap. The opposite of retroactive discovery.
Lifecycle Authority
The right, and the cryptographic means, to provision, rotate, and revoke a non-human identity. Not a feature. A jurisdiction.
NHIG Maturity
An enterprise's position on the Non-Human Identity Governance spectrum: from unaware, through discovered, to continuously governed. The trajectory the NHIG Standard describes.
The Identity Layer
The fabric that governs every non-human identity in the enterprise. Above the workload, beneath the audit. What human IAM was never built to be.
The formal document behind
the vocabulary.
The NHIG Standard is the versioned reference document that formalizes the primitives, principles, and maturity model behind these terms. Cite the Standard in RFPs. Use the vocabulary in conversation.
Read the NHIG Standard→