They should replace the shared login with a faster individual access path and make the reporting value explicit. Privileged users usually resist because shared access feels simple, but investigations, recertification, and segregation of duties all depend on single-user attribution. That trade-off should be stated clearly in policy and workflow design.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Shared logins are not just an audit inconvenience. They erase attribution, weaken recertification, and make it difficult to prove who approved or executed a privileged action. That matters even more for NHI governance, where secrets, service accounts, and automation already expand the attack surface. NHI Mgmt Group research shows that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which is why hidden privilege often persists until an incident forces the issue. Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks
The practical objection from privileged users is usually speed, not principle. If the individual path is slower than the shared login, workarounds will appear. Current guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and NHI governance best practice both point the same way: remove friction before demanding behaviour change. In practice, many security teams encounter the real cost of shared logins only after an investigation cannot reconstruct actions cleanly or a review cycle fails to validate access properly.
How It Works in Practice
The replacement path should be faster than the shared account, not merely more compliant. That usually means combining individual identity, OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10-aligned controls, and a privilege elevation workflow that is JIT by default. For humans, that can mean approved elevation through PAM with step-up authentication, short session duration, and automatic revocation. For workloads, the same principle becomes ephemeral secrets, narrow-scoped tokens, and workload identity rather than static shared credentials.
Teams should make the reporting value visible in the workflow itself. If every privileged action is tied to a person, investigations can answer who, what, when, and why without cross-checking shared password use or informal chat approvals. That also supports RBAC and segregation of duties, because access is assigned to a named identity and reviewed against actual usage rather than a communal bucket of entitlement. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks notes that 79% of organisations have experienced secrets leaks, which is a reminder that shared privileged access and exposed credentials often fail together.
- Give each administrator a unique account and keep it the only path for production changes.
- Use PAM for elevation, but issue access just in time and revoke it automatically at task end.
- Log the individual, target system, ticket, and approval so recertification is evidence-based.
- Keep emergency access as a break-glass exception, not a routine operating model.
These controls tend to break down in heavily scripted environments where teams rely on long-lived automation accounts and undocumented runbooks because speed is optimised around the shared credential, not the person using it.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter access controls often increase operational overhead, so organisations need to balance faster response times against stronger attribution and review. There is no universal standard for every admin scenario, but current guidance suggests preserving a narrow set of exceptions rather than tolerating permanent shared access. Break-glass accounts may still be justified for outage recovery, yet they should be vaulted, monitored, and tested, with post-use review mandatory.
Some teams also have to deal with legacy systems that cannot support per-user access or modern PAM integration. In those cases, the least-bad option is compensating control: wrap the system with a jump host, enforce session recording, require MFA at the gateway, and retire the shared login as soon as a technical upgrade is possible. NHI Mgmt Group research also shows that 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, which is a useful reminder that any exception relying on standing credentials should be treated as temporary and high-risk.
For agentic and machine-driven operations, the same principle still applies, but the implementation changes: use workload identity, short-lived secrets, and policy evaluated at request time. Best practice is evolving here, and teams should avoid assuming that human admin patterns translate cleanly to autonomous systems.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-03 | Shared logins hide attribution and hinder access review and rotation. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | This question is about managing access rights and privileged attribution. |
| NIST AI RMF | Useful where shared access supports AI or automated privileged workflows. |
Replace communal credentials with named identities and rotate or revoke standing access aggressively.
