Who should own review of monitoring and token-issuing privileges?

Ownership should sit with the identity and cloud governance functions together, because the permissions affect both access design and visibility design. Security operations can flag the risk, but IAM, PAM, and cloud platform owners must jointly approve the entitlement, define its purpose, and recertify it on a regular basis.

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Monitoring and token-issuing privileges sit at the intersection of access control and detection coverage, so ownership cannot be treated as a simple ticket assignment. If the wrong function approves them, teams often end up with blind spots in logging, overbroad issuance rights, or “temporary” access that never gets removed. The risk is especially visible in NHI environments, where credential sprawl and token exposure can be more damaging than a single misconfigured role.

NHIMG research shows how quickly those gaps become operational issues: in the 2025 State of NHIs and Secrets in Cybersecurity, 44% of NHI tokens were reported exposed in the wild, and 50% of organisations were onboarding new vaults without proper security approval. That combination makes ownership a governance issue, not just a technical one. The OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 frames these failures as a recurring pattern: excessive privilege, weak lifecycle control, and poor observability often travel together.

In practice, many security teams encounter broken token governance only after exposed secrets or missing logs have already been used in an investigation.

How It Works in Practice

Ownership should be split by control intent, then unified through approval workflow. Identity governance owns the entitlement design because token-issuing rights determine who can mint access, under what conditions, and with what expiry. Cloud platform owners own the service-specific implementation because the actual monitoring scopes, audit sinks, and API permissions differ across clouds and telemetry stacks. Security operations validates whether the privilege meaningfully improves detection and whether the logging path is usable during incident response.

A practical approval model usually includes:

• Defined business purpose for each monitoring or token-issuing entitlement.
• Named system owner, with IAM and cloud governance as joint approvers.
• Recertification on a fixed cadence, especially for elevated token minting rights.
• Logging requirements that specify what must be captured, retained, and reviewed.
• Revocation triggers for unused, duplicated, or inherited privileges.

This aligns with current guidance in the NIST AI Risk Management Framework only indirectly, because the same control principle applies: assign accountable ownership to the function that can both authorise and audit the risk. For NHI-specific lifecycle issues, the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide is a useful operational reference, especially where issuance and logging are tied to one another. The CISA Identity and Access Management guidance also reinforces least privilege and periodic review as baseline expectations.

These controls tend to break down in multi-cloud environments with delegated admin models because each platform exposes different logging surfaces and token-creation paths.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter approval control often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance faster engineering delivery against stronger oversight. That tradeoff becomes sharper when teams need emergency monitoring access, short-lived break-glass tokens, or service accounts used by CI/CD pipelines.

Best practice is evolving for these cases, and there is no universal standard for this yet. In mature environments, security teams often delegate routine review to IAM or cloud governance, while high-risk exceptions move to a joint review board that includes operations and security leadership. For platform-native telemetry, some organisations allow cloud owners to approve the technical scope, while IAM retains authority over who may issue tokens and for how long.

Two edge cases deserve special handling. First, third-party integrations may need token-issuing rights to support automated observability, but those rights should be constrained to specific workloads and reviewed separately from human admin access. Second, if a monitoring role can also change alert routing or suppress detections, it should be treated as a privileged control plane function, not a standard operational permission. NHIMG’s Top 10 NHI Issues and the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge both reflect the same pattern: when ownership is unclear, privilege expands faster than review cycles can contain it.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• When should organizations review their NHI policies?
• When should organizations review access controls?
• When should enterprises review their extension policies?
• Who should own identity governance when it spans cloud and enterprise systems?