Access review loses context when identities, roles, and entitlements are scattered across systems. Reviewers cannot reliably see who has access, why they have it, or whether it is still justified. That leads to weak certifications, delayed revocation, and poor audit evidence. A central identity view is the baseline for any governance model that needs to scale.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
IGA only works when reviewers can reconcile identity, entitlement, and ownership data from a single source of truth. When that view is fragmented across HR systems, SaaS apps, PAM tools, and custom directories, certifications become a paperwork exercise rather than a control. The result is slow revocation, duplicate entitlements, and weak evidence for auditors. This is especially risky for non-human identities, where service accounts and API keys often outnumber human users and are harder to trace.
NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, which makes central visibility a governance requirement rather than a nice-to-have. The scale problem is amplified by entitlement drift and secrets sprawl, both of which are documented across NHI incidents in the 52 NHI Breaches Analysis. In practice, many security teams discover the missing context only after a certification cycle has already approved stale access.
For governance programs mapped to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, the core issue is not just inventory. It is whether access decisions can be justified, traced, and revoked across systems that do not agree on identity state.
How It Works in Practice
A central identity view should aggregate the minimum decision data needed for governance: who or what the identity is, which system owns it, what roles or entitlements are active, when access was granted, and what business justification supports it. For human identities, that often starts with HR as the authoritative source. For NHIs, the authoritative source may be a CI/CD pipeline, workload registry, or secrets platform. The key is that IGA normalizes these sources into one reviewable model instead of forcing reviewers to jump between consoles.
In a practical implementation, the central view usually feeds three functions:
- Access certification, so reviewers see current access plus origin and approver history.
- Provisioning and deprovisioning, so changes in status can trigger revocation across connected systems.
- Audit evidence, so the organisation can show who reviewed what, when, and on what basis.
This is also where NHI-specific controls matter. If a service account’s owner is unknown, if a token is embedded in code, or if a workload has no lifecycle metadata, the identity record becomes incomplete and governance loses precision. The operational lesson from NHI incidents such as the JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure is that revocation without central context is often delayed, partial, or missed entirely. Current guidance suggests treating the central identity view as a governance layer, not just a reporting layer, and aligning it with identity lifecycle controls described in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
These controls tend to break down when identities are created outside governed workflows, because orphaned accounts and untracked secrets never enter the review population.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter centralisation often increases integration overhead, requiring organisations to balance governance accuracy against legacy-system complexity. That tradeoff becomes visible in mergers, multi-cloud estates, and environments with many machine-to-machine identities, where no single platform owns the full lifecycle.
There is no universal standard for this yet, but best practice is evolving toward a federated central view: one governance plane, multiple authoritative sources, and strong correlation rules. That matters when an identity spans IAM, PAM, secrets management, and application ownership. If the record is incomplete, reviewers should not be asked to infer intent from inconsistent system data.
Edge cases are common. Shared service accounts may need compensating controls because ownership is diffuse. Third-party identities may require vendor-specific attributes and shorter certification windows. Emergency access can also distort the model unless it is tagged clearly and expires automatically. NHI Management Group data shows that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which is why the absence of a central view is usually a signal of broader lifecycle weakness, not just a tooling gap. Programs trying to enforce governance without that baseline often end up with approvals that look compliant but cannot survive a serious audit or incident review.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | GV.OC-01 | Central identity view supports governance, ownership, and accountability decisions. |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 | Fragmented identity data drives poor visibility and uncontrolled NHI sprawl. |
| NIST AI RMF | Central identity visibility supports traceable, accountable AI-related identity governance. |
Apply AI RMF governance to ensure identity records, approvals, and revocation paths are explainable and auditable.
