What should IAM leaders prioritise after a year of remote work expansion?

IAM leaders should prioritise reducing authentication shortcuts, tightening device trust and documenting access exceptions. Remote work makes access control a moving target, so the programme needs stronger governance over how users recover, how sessions are verified and how quickly risky access is removed.

Why This Matters for Security Teams

A year of remote work expansion usually exposes the gap between policy and reality: authentication shortcuts multiply, device assurance becomes inconsistent, and exception handling turns into a permanent control bypass. For IAM leaders, the issue is not just remote access volume, but the fact that access decisions are now made across unmanaged networks, variable devices, and time zones that weaken traditional assumptions about trust and session continuity. NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 stresses governance and continuous risk management, which is exactly where remote work pressures land first.

The practical risk is that users who were approved for temporary flexibility often keep that flexibility long after the original business case has expired. That creates hidden privilege, weak recovery paths, and undocumented exceptions that auditors cannot reconstruct cleanly. The result is not simply more login events, but more ambiguity about who is entitled to what, from where, and under which conditions. NHIMG research on The Ultimate Guide to NHIs shows how quickly access governance erodes when lifecycle discipline is weak, and the same pattern appears in human IAM when remote access grows without tighter controls. In practice, many security teams discover this drift only after a risky exception has already been abused or a recovery path has already been tested by an attacker.

How It Works in Practice

The first priority is to replace convenience-driven access with verifiable access. That means tightening device trust, requiring stronger session validation, and making exception approvals time-bound rather than open-ended. Leaders should treat recovery flows as high-risk pathways, because password resets, MFA resets, and help desk overrides are often the easiest route around otherwise solid controls. NIST guidance on identity and access management supports this focus on assurance, while The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report highlights the broader pattern that security teams often tolerate short-term shortcuts while hoping to revisit them later.

In practice, a strong programme usually includes:

• Device trust rules that distinguish managed endpoints from merely authenticated ones.
• Session controls that re-check risk during the session, not only at login.
• Documented exception registers with expiry dates, owners, and review cadence.
• Recovery workflows that require stronger proof for reset, re-enrolment, or support override.
• Access reviews that explicitly identify remote-work exceptions and remove stale approvals.

Security teams should also align IAM with endpoint telemetry and conditional access policy, because remote work fails when identity controls and device controls are operated as separate programmes. When exceptions are tracked in email threads or ticket comments, they are effectively invisible governance debt. Controls tend to break down when contractors, BYOD users, or geographically distributed teams rely on legacy VPN patterns and shared support processes because those environments create too many overlapping trust decisions at once.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter access control often increases friction for legitimate users, requiring organisations to balance user experience against assurance and auditability. That tradeoff is real, especially where remote work depends on regulated business processes, external partners, or staff who cannot use fully managed devices. Current guidance suggests using compensating controls rather than blanket exceptions, but there is no universal standard for this yet.

One edge case is emergency access. Break-glass accounts may still be needed, but they should be rare, monitored, and rotated aggressively rather than treated as standing admin access. Another is third-party support, where remote sessions are often granted too broadly and then left active after the task is complete. NHIMG’s research on Schneider Electric credentials breach illustrates how credential misuse becomes more damaging when access is not tightly scoped or quickly revoked.

The best practice is evolving toward shorter approval windows, stronger attestation for risky access, and clearer ownership for exception cleanup. That is especially important where remote work has normalised fast fixes that were never meant to become policy. Organisations that cannot inventory exceptions reliably should assume their access model is already drifting beyond what policy documents claim.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should security teams reduce remote-work identity risk for employees using home offices?
• How do you know if remote work security controls are actually working?
• What should IAM leaders do when users keep bypassing authentication controls?
• How should security teams prioritise NHI remediation in cloud environments?