Use the same governance spine for both, then adapt controls by actor type. Humans need certification and strong account lifecycle handling. Non-human identities need ownership, rotation, and offboarding. The shared objective is to keep granted access tightly matched to current purpose.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Entitlement drift is not just an access review problem. It is what happens when granted permissions outlive the purpose that justified them, then spread across accounts, secrets, SaaS apps, and automation paths. For human identities, that usually shows up as stale group membership or orphaned privileges. For non-human identities, the blast radius is often larger because service accounts, API keys, and workflow tokens are reused across systems and rarely revisited with the same discipline.
The practical risk is that drift silently turns least privilege into “mostly current.” NHI Management Group’s research shows that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges and only 20% of organisations have formal offboarding and revocation processes, which makes drift a structural issue rather than a one-time cleanup task. A useful external baseline is the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, which reinforces continuous governance rather than periodic trust. The same pattern is visible in real incidents such as the Salesloft OAuth token breach, where token misuse became an access problem, not just a credential problem. In practice, many security teams encounter entitlement drift only after an incident review exposes privileges that no one could explain or revoke in time.
How It Works in Practice
The most reliable approach is to run a single governance model across both identity types, then vary the controls based on how the actor is used. That means one authoritative inventory, one review cadence, and one set of ownership expectations, but different enforcement steps for people and workloads. Humans need manager and application-owner certification, joiner-mover-leaver handling, and rapid removal when roles change. NHIs need named owners, purpose binding, rotation, and offboarding tied to the lifecycle of the system or process they support.
In operational terms, this usually includes:
- classifying every identity by actor type, business purpose, and owner
- mapping each entitlement to a current task, application, or approved workflow
- flagging privileges that are unused, duplicated, or no longer justified
- automating review evidence so exceptions are time-bound and visible
- revoking or reissuing NHI secrets when the owning app, pipeline, or integration changes
For NHIs, the strongest control is to treat credentials as ephemeral where possible and to rotate or revoke anything long-lived when purpose changes. For humans, that means access reviews must be tied to real job functions rather than broad role labels. NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs highlights why this matters: excessive privileges and weak offboarding are common enough that drift should be assumed unless controls prove otherwise. The same control logic aligns with identity governance guidance in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and with secrets hygiene practices described in the JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure case, where a leaked token becomes persistent access if rotation and revocation are not enforced. These controls tend to break down in fast-moving CI/CD environments because permissions are added automatically but rarely reconciled when the pipeline or dependency changes.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter access governance often increases operational overhead, so teams have to balance speed against certainty. That tradeoff is especially visible in engineering-heavy environments, where service accounts, build agents, and SaaS integrations change often and owners may be distributed across multiple teams.
Current guidance suggests a few practical variations. First, some organisations use shorter certification cycles for privileged NHIs than for human accounts, but there is no universal standard for this yet. Second, break-glass accounts should be treated as exceptions with explicit expiry and post-use review, not as permanent shortcuts. Third, shared service identities are a common source of drift because one account can accumulate access for many workloads, making ownership and offboarding harder. Fourth, third-party integrations need the same lifecycle treatment as internal accounts, especially when a vendor connection outlives the original use case.
The key is to avoid a false symmetry between humans and NHIs. Humans drift through role change and exception creep. NHIs drift through reuse, token sprawl, and forgotten automation. NHI Management Group’s research suggests that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into service accounts, so many teams cannot reduce drift until they first inventory what exists. The best-practice direction is evolving toward continuous entitlement evaluation rather than annual cleanup, but the implementation details still vary by environment and maturity.
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 and CSA MAESTRO address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-03 | Rotation and offboarding are core to stopping NHI entitlement drift. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-01 | Identity lifecycle governance directly reduces stale access and orphaned accounts. |
| CSA MAESTRO | IAM | Agent and workload identity governance helps prevent hidden access drift. |
Inventory identities, assign owners, and continuously review access against current business need.
