Should organisations prioritise passwordless or privileged access modernisation first?

Most organisations should modernise privileged access controls first or in parallel, because the highest risk usually sits in service accounts, root access and shared administrative paths. Passwordless can improve user experience, but it does not address over-privilege, shared credentials or poor auditability on its own.

Why This Matters for Security Teams

For most organisations, this is not a simple either-or decision. Passwordless programmes reduce phishing and credential reuse for people, but privileged access modernisation removes the largest blast radius first: service accounts, shared admin paths, root credentials and long-lived secrets. The gap is often invisible until a breach. NHI Mgmt Group research shows that 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys, which is why the order of operations matters more than the slogan. See the Ultimate Guide to NHIs and the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 for the underlying risk model.

The practical issue is that passwordless often modernises authentication for users, while privileged access modernisation changes how high-risk access is granted, approved, monitored and revoked. Those are different controls with different failure modes. If a team deploys passwordless at scale but leaves standing privileges, hardcoded secrets and weak session oversight untouched, the core exposure remains. In practice, many security teams discover the real weakness only after an API key, backup account or service credential has already been abused, rather than through intentional review.

How It Works in Practice

Most security programmes get better results by treating privileged access modernisation as the foundation and passwordless as an adjacent track. Start with identities that can do the most damage: admin accounts, break-glass accounts, service principals, CI/CD secrets and machine-to-machine credentials. Then reduce standing privilege by moving to 52 NHI Breaches Analysis style patterns of excessive access review, and align the control plane to the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 guidance.

• Inventory all privileged human and non-human identities, including service accounts hidden in scripts, schedulers and pipelines.
• Replace shared credentials with named workload identities and enforce least privilege at the permission boundary.
• Introduce JIT access for administrative elevation so elevated rights exist only for a task window.
• Use PAM for session brokering, approval, recording and revocation of high-risk access.
• Move secrets into managed stores with rotation and expiry, rather than leaving them embedded in code or config.

Passwordless can then be layered on for workforce authentication, but it should not be used as a substitute for privileged access controls. The strongest programmes also use audit trails and entitlement reviews to confirm that reduced credential friction did not accidentally increase standing access. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks is useful here because it frames rotation, visibility and lifecycle control as governance problems, not just tooling problems. These controls tend to break down when legacy systems require shared admin accounts because the organisation cannot broker or scope access without reengineering the application.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter privileged access controls often increase operational overhead, so organisations must balance speed for end users against control depth for high-risk access. There is no universal standard for sequencing every environment, but current guidance suggests starting with whichever path most directly reduces blast radius. For example, if a business has rampant admin sprawl, PAM and JIT deliver faster risk reduction than a workforce passwordless rollout. If the main problem is user phishing and reused passwords, passwordless can proceed in parallel, but it should not consume the whole security roadmap.

Edge cases matter. In cloud-native estates, workload identities and short-lived tokens may be more urgent than classic PAM for people, because automation often outnumbers humans. In regulated environments, auditability may force privileged access modernisation first so access decisions are recorded before any broader authentication change. NHI Mgmt Group research also notes that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which means modernisation can be impossible without first finding the accounts. That visibility problem is documented in the BeyondTrust API key breach and reinforced by the Ultimate Guide to NHIs and 52 NHI Breaches Analysis. In practice, the right sequence is usually the one that removes the most dangerous standing privilege first, not the one that looks simplest on an identity roadmap.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

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• Should organisations prioritise access review or lifecycle automation first?