They should look for process friction, role ambiguity, and poor reviewer context before adding more review staff. Long campaigns often mean the control is too manual, the access model is too broad, or both. Shortening the cycle without improving evidence quality usually just moves the bottleneck.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
When access certifications drag on, the issue is usually not the calendar, but the control design. Long review cycles often point to vague entitlement naming, overlapping roles, stale ownership, and reviewers who do not have enough context to make fast decisions. That matters because certification is supposed to reduce risk, not become a recurring administrative backlog. For non-human identity estates, the problem is amplified by scale and privilege sprawl, which is why NHI Mgmt Group notes that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges in its Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
Security teams often try to solve delay by adding reviewers or extending deadlines, but that usually treats the symptom. Current guidance suggests the better fix is to narrow what is being certified, improve evidence quality, and automate low-risk decisions so humans only review exceptions. The review itself becomes faster when access is tied to clear business purpose, lifecycle state, and ownership. The OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 reinforces that identity sprawl and weak governance are recurring drivers of risk, not just audit inconvenience. In practice, many security teams encounter failed certifications only after the first cleanup campaign has already stalled the business.
How It Works in Practice
The practical answer is to redesign certification so it is evidence-led and exception-based. Start by grouping access into meaningful review sets, such as production, privileged, external-facing, dormant, and service-account access. Then give reviewers context they can act on: last used date, owner, system purpose, ticket history, and whether the identity is still tied to an active workload or employee. If the certification subject is an NHI, tie the review to lifecycle controls described in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks.
Automation helps most when it is used to pre-clear obvious cases and route only ambiguous access for human review. A practical pattern is:
- auto-approve low-risk access that matches a current role, workload, or ticket;
- flag privileged, unused, or inherited access for manual review;
- remove orphaned or unowned entitlements immediately after validation fails;
- use shorter certification windows only where the access is truly sensitive.
For NHIs, the review should also confirm whether secrets, tokens, or certificates still match the workload lifecycle. If a service account has no clear owner or no observed use, the certification process should trigger remediation rather than just a note in the audit trail. This aligns with the broader security lesson seen in the 52 NHI Breaches Analysis: weak visibility and delayed cleanup turn routine access reviews into breach-enabling drift. These controls tend to break down when entitlement data is fragmented across IAM, PAM, CI/CD, and cloud consoles because reviewers cannot verify the full context from one place.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter certification often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance faster review cycles against the burden of assembling accurate evidence. That tradeoff is real, especially in distributed environments where service accounts, API keys, and cloud roles are created and retired outside the normal IAM workflow. Best practice is evolving, but there is no universal standard for this yet: some teams certify by application owner, others by workload, and others by control domain such as privilege tier or data sensitivity.
Two edge cases deserve special handling. First, highly dynamic environments, such as CI/CD pipelines and ephemeral workloads, should not be forced through a human review model designed for stable human access. Second, access that is inherited through group nesting or platform defaults often looks harmless in the report but hides real privilege. In both cases, the review should focus on whether the access is still necessary and whether the control can be made automatic. The OWASP guidance and the NHIMG research above both point to the same operational pattern: if reviewers must decode the environment before making a decision, the certification design is too broad.
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 CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 | Access review backlog often stems from weak NHI ownership and entitlement sprawl. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Least-privilege review is the core control behind meaningful access certifications. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | GV.RM-03 | Long campaigns reveal governance gaps in risk-based prioritisation and control design. |
Map every service account and secret to an owner, purpose, and review cadence before the next certification cycle.
