They should look for fewer accounts with persistent privilege, faster removal of stale access, and tighter linkage between identity state and network enforcement. If zero trust is only changing remote access tools but not entitlement hygiene, the programme is cosmetic rather than effective.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Universities often adopt zero trust to reduce remote-access risk, but identity security only improves when the programme changes entitlement hygiene, not just the login path. For higher education, that means measuring whether accounts lose standing privilege, whether stale access is removed quickly, and whether identity state actually drives enforcement. The NIST Zero Trust Architecture guidance is clear that policy decisions should be continuous, not assumed after initial authentication.
That distinction matters because universities have sprawling identity estates: students, faculty, contractors, researchers, cloud services, and automation all coexist in the same control plane. NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that 90% of IT leaders say properly managing NHIs is essential for a successful zero-trust implementation, which reflects a broader truth in higher education too. In practice, many campuses discover that “Zero Trust” improved the VPN experience long before it improved access governance.
How It Works in Practice
To tell whether Zero Trust is improving identity security, universities need metrics that tie authentication, authorisation, and revocation together. A mature programme should show fewer persistent entitlements, shorter-lived access grants, faster deprovisioning, and better correlation between identity events and network policy changes. That is the operational meaning of continuous verification described in NIST SP 800-207 Zero Trust Architecture.
Practitioners should separate cosmetic deployment from measurable control improvement. For example:
- Track standing privilege by role, department, and system, then confirm whether Zero Trust reduces the number of always-on privileged accounts.
- Measure stale access removal time after graduation, termination, lab transfer, or grant closure.
- Check whether conditional access, device posture, and network segmentation are enforced from the same identity source of truth.
- Review service accounts, API keys, and automation identities alongside human users, because universities rarely secure one without affecting the other.
NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs shows why this matters: 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, and only 20% of organisations have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys. If Zero Trust does not improve those numbers, it is not really reducing identity risk. The best practice is to treat identity and network policy as one control loop, then validate it with access reviews, revocation SLAs, and log correlation across IAM, PAM, and enforcement points. These controls tend to break down when universities run separate identity silos for students, staff, research clouds, and shared lab systems because revocation and policy updates stop arriving at the same speed.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter enforcement often increases operational overhead, requiring universities to balance stronger identity control against research agility and admin burden. That tradeoff is real, especially in environments where labs, grants, and guest researchers need rapid access. Current guidance suggests that the answer is not to relax Zero Trust, but to apply context-aware exceptions with short TTLs, explicit approval, and automatic expiry.
Edge cases matter. A university may reduce VPN use and still have weak identity security if shared lab accounts, legacy directory groups, or unmanaged service principals remain untouched. Likewise, improved MFA coverage does not prove Zero Trust is working if privileged access is still persistent or if offboarding lags behind HR events. NHI Management Group’s 52 NHI Breaches Analysis shows that identity-related failures often surface first as credential abuse, not perimeter failure, which is why universities should include non-human identities in every Zero Trust scorecard.
There is no universal standard for this yet, but the most credible universities benchmark outcomes instead of tooling. If the programme is working, standing privilege falls, stale access disappears faster, and identity state becomes the trigger for policy rather than a separate administrative record.
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 Zero Trust (SP 800-207) and NIST CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | Policy Engine / Continuous Verification | Zero Trust must continuously re-evaluate identity state and access context. |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-03 | Persistent credentials and poor rotation undermine identity security outcomes. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Access permissions management is the clearest way to test identity improvement. |
Reduce standing access and enforce lifecycle controls for service accounts, API keys, and tokens.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- How can security teams tell whether their identity programme is ready for zero trust?
- How do IAM teams know whether zero trust and segmentation are actually working?
- How should security teams choose between Zero Trust and Defense in Depth for identity governance?
- How can teams tell whether DSPM is actually improving security?
