If you’ve ever tried to manage hundreds of service accounts or API keys manually, you’ll know how easy it is for credentials to go stale - or worse, get forgotten altogether. In the modern enterprise, identities aren’t limited to humans. Machine identities - service accounts, API keys, bots, containers, and automation scripts - carry privileges across critical systems. Unlike human accounts, these identities often use long-lived credentials, creating a major security risk. 

At Intragen, we view credential rotation for machine identities as a cornerstone of securing these non-human actors. Rotating credentials reduces exposure, mitigates insider threats, enforces least privilege, and strengthens overall identity hygiene.

The challenge of machine identities 

Machine identities are multiplying at an unprecedented rate. Research shows:

• They can outnumber human identities by a magnitude of 82 to 1 according to CyberArk.
• BeyondTrust states that 95% of machine identities are over-privileged, often using static or hard-coded credentials.

These unmanaged credentials are a prime target for attackers. Once compromised, a single API key or service account can give attackers access to critical systems and data - just like a human administrator.

Why credential management matters

Rotating credentials is more than a compliance checkbox. For machine identities, it:

• Reduces the window of exposure if a credential is leaked or misused.
• Prevents exploitation of ‘ghost accounts’ with accumulated long-lived access.
• Enforces security hygiene automatically, even for ephemeral or temporary identities.

In short, credential management ensures that machine identities can’t become hidden attack vectors. We regularly find that machine credentials are left unchanged for years, even in otherwise mature environments. It’s one of the most common identity blind spots we uncover.

How to manage credentials of machine identities

Effective management requires more than manual updates and a basic inventory. Adopt best practices such as:

1. 1. Vaulting your credentials: Store all machine credentials in a secure, encrypted and centralised Privileged Access Management or secrets management platform. This allows granularity in access controls and ease of maintenance.
   2. Automating rotation: Dynamic secrets or automated rotation schedules reduce manual effort and human error while ensuring that credentials expire before they are compromised.
   3. Integrating with your workflows: Integrate your CI/CD pipelines, APIs, and cloud platforms with your Privileged Access Management platform so that secrets are retrieved automatically when needed instead of being scattered across different systems or hardcoded in source code.
   4. Monitoring and audits: Even after rotation, track which identities are using credentials, detect anomalies, and retire unused accounts.

By automating management and integrating it into machine workflows, organisations can maintain security at scale.

A real-world perspective

Imagine a large enterprise with hundreds of microservices and thousands of service accounts. Before implementing automated credential management, developers hard-coded API keys into scripts. An audit revealed that most keys hadn’t changed for years. A study by CyberArk showed that after centralising credentials and enabling automated rotation, the enterprise reduced the number of over-privileged credentials by 74%.

This is a tangible example of how managing machine identity credentials transforms security from reactive to proactive.

The Intragen approach 

At Intragen, we believe securing machine identities is as important as securing human accounts. Managing credentials is a fundamental step: it closes gaps, reduces risk, and enforces accountability.

As machine identities continue to proliferate, organisations that fail to manage credentials are leaving their systems exposed. Credential management doesn’t have to be complex. With Intragen’s Managed Privileged Access - powered by CyberArk Privilege Cloud - it’s automatic, auditable, and always up to date.