Ownership should sit with the programme that can reconcile inventory, entitlement data, and business purpose across environments, usually the IAM or identity governance team with security leadership backing. The key is not a single tool owner, but a single accountable process for discovery, certification, and cleanup.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
identity sprawl becomes a governance problem the moment cloud, on-premises, SaaS, and automation all issue privileges from different control planes. The remediation question is not academic: stale accounts, duplicate entitlements, and orphaned service identities create blind spots that security teams often discover only after an audit failure or incident. NHI Management Group has shown how quickly non-human identities scale in practice, and the NHI and Secrets Risk Report highlights why overprivileged, long-lived identities remain a persistent exposure.
For most organisations, the mistake is treating remediation as a ticket routed to whatever team owns one platform. That approach fragments accountability and leaves no one able to reconcile inventory, entitlement data, and business purpose across domains. Current guidance suggests the accountable owner must sit where identity governance, security oversight, and cross-platform coordination meet, not inside a single infrastructure silo. The best model is a single process owner backed by leaders who can force cleanup across cloud and on-premises systems. In practice, many security teams encounter identity sprawl only after access reviews stall or privileged access is abused, rather than through intentional lifecycle control.
How It Works in Practice
Effective remediation starts with one accountable programme that can see the full identity graph. That usually means IAM or identity governance, supported by security leadership, while platform teams execute fixes in their respective environments. The team should build a shared inventory that covers human accounts, service accounts, API keys, workload identities, and privileged access paths. Without that breadth, cloud cleanup can succeed while on-premises entitlements remain untouched, or vice versa.
Practitioners usually break the work into three steps:
- Discover identities and entitlements across directories, cloud accounts, PAM vaults, CI/CD, and infrastructure tools.
- Reconcile ownership by mapping each identity to a business purpose, system owner, and lifecycle status.
- Remediate with controlled actions: disable, rotate, rebind, or remove access, then verify that downstream services still function.
That process should be governed as a change-management programme, not a one-time cleanup. NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 reinforces the need for coordinated governance and access control outcomes, while the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 provides a useful structure for linking identification, protection, and recovery activities. For identity-specific context, the Ultimate Guide to NHIs is a useful reference for how non-human identities proliferate across modern estates.
Operationally, the key is to give the identity programme authority to prioritize, set remediation standards, and escalate blockers. Platform owners can remediate in their domain, but they should not get to redefine whether a stale account, excessive privilege, or orphaned secret is acceptable. These controls tend to break down when ownership is split between cloud operations and traditional directory teams because no one can enforce one consistent cleanup decision.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter remediation control often increases coordination overhead, requiring organisations to balance speed against verification and business continuity. That tradeoff is especially visible when legacy applications, mergers, or regulated workloads still depend on shared accounts or local admin access. In those cases, best practice is evolving rather than settled: there is no universal standard for exactly how quickly every identity type must be removed, but there is broad agreement that exceptions need expiry dates, documented owners, and compensating controls.
Edge cases usually appear where cloud and on-premises responsibilities overlap. A service account may authenticate to an on-premises database while its secret is stored in a cloud vault, or a workload identity may be provisioned by CI/CD but consumed by a legacy application. Remediation should follow the identity’s business purpose and dependency chain, not the location of the secret alone. That is why identity governance, rather than infrastructure ownership, is the safer place for accountability.
Where remediation reaches privileged or non-human access, pairing the process with PAM, JIT access, and periodic certification is often necessary. The Top 10 NHI Issues and the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge both underscore the same practical point: remediation fails when teams clean up individual systems without fixing the underlying identity lifecycle.
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-01 | Identity sprawl and orphaned NHIs map directly to discovery and lifecycle control. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-1 | Cross-environment remediation depends on managed identity and access governance. |
| CSA MAESTRO | MAESTRO addresses governance of distributed agent and identity control across platforms. |
Centralize identity ownership, then verify access changes across cloud and on-prem systems.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- How should IAM teams respond when Office 365 identity sprawl spans human and non-human access?
- Who should own remediation when Office 365 identity risk is found?
- Who should own remediation when posture findings cross AD, cloud, and SaaS?
- How should security teams prioritise NHI remediation in cloud environments?
