How can organisations reduce risk from third-party service credentials?

Inventory them as part of the same identity perimeter as internal secrets. Third-party email, messaging, and marketing credentials should have explicit owners, limited scope, and revocation procedures tied to offboarding and vendor change. Otherwise, the trust boundary extends far beyond the team that issued the key.

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Third-party service credentials are often treated as vendor setup details, but they are operational secrets with the same blast radius as internal API keys. When marketing, support, or messaging platforms are connected with long-lived tokens, the risk is not just misuse by the vendor. It is also hidden persistence after staff changes, weak ownership, and credential sprawl across channels that were never designed for secure handoff.

The problem is visible in current industry research. In The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report, 23.7% of organisations said they share secrets through insecure methods such as email or messaging applications, and 88.5% said their non-human IAM practices lag behind or merely match their human IAM efforts. That gap matters because third-party credentials frequently sit outside standard joiner-mover-leaver controls even when they power production workflows. Security teams that assume a vendor-owned service is automatically vendor-managed usually discover the opposite only after a contractor leaves, an integration changes hands, or an exposed key is reused elsewhere.

How It Works in Practice

Reducing risk starts by treating third-party service credentials as part of the same identity perimeter as internal secrets. That means every credential gets an explicit owner, a documented business purpose, a named vendor relationship, and a revocation path. This is consistent with the direction of the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and the identity governance emphasis in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0.

In practical terms, strong programs usually combine these steps:

• Centralise inventory so every third-party token, key, certificate, and OAuth grant is tracked with owner, system, scope, and expiry.
• Prefer short-lived, scoped access over static secrets, and rotate immediately after vendor changes, staff turnover, or incident response.
• Use separate credentials per environment and per function, rather than one key reused across multiple channels or regions.
• Bind offboarding to automation so vendor termination, contract end, or unused integration triggers revocation, not just a ticket.
• Log authentication, token creation, scope changes, and revocation events so security can detect stale access and suspicious reuse.

NHIMG guidance on the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge is directly relevant here: once credentials are copied into chat, tickets, and spreadsheets, revocation becomes slower and far less reliable. In parallel, NIST SP 800-63 Digital Identity Guidelines reinforces the need for lifecycle control and assurance around identity proofing and credential management. These controls tend to break down when a marketing or support platform is administered informally by multiple teams because ownership and change control become ambiguous.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter control often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance faster vendor onboarding against stronger revocation and scope discipline. That tradeoff is real, especially for SaaS tools that only support coarse permissions or opaque token models. Current guidance suggests that where granular scoping is unavailable, organisations should compensate with compensating controls such as isolated accounts, network restrictions, and very short rotation intervals, but there is no universal standard for this yet.

Some environments also have hybrid ownership, where the business team buys the service but IT or security manages the integration. In those cases, risk is highest when no single function can revoke access quickly. Research from The 52 NHI Breaches Report shows how credential exposure and weak lifecycle control repeatedly appear in real incidents, not just policy gaps. One useful benchmark from The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report is that 59.8% of organisations see value in dynamic ephemeral credentials, which is a strong signal that short-lived access is becoming operationally practical.

For regulated workflows, the safest pattern is often least privilege plus explicit service ownership, even if that means more integration effort up front. If a third-party credential cannot be inventoried, scoped, and revoked on demand, it should be treated as a high-risk exception rather than a routine business dependency.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should security teams reduce third-party identity risk in customer support platforms?
• How do organisations reduce the dwell time of exposed credentials at scale?
• How can organisations reduce risk from third-party OAuth integrations?
• How do organisations reduce risk from third-party machine identities?