Why do large access review campaigns often produce mass approvals?

Mass approvals happen when the review queue is too large, too uniform, and too time-compressed for human judgement to keep up. Reviewers respond by batching decisions, escalating late, or approving by pattern. That is a governance design signal, not a staffing signal, and it usually means the certification model is overextended.

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Large access review rarely fail because reviewers are careless. They fail because the process asks humans to make precise privilege judgments at a scale and speed that the certification model cannot sustain. When queues become uniform, repetitive, and time-boxed, reviewers default to pattern approval, especially when they lack context for each entitlement. That turns access review into a throughput exercise instead of a risk decision.

This matters because mass approvals can preserve toxic access, stale secrets, and overbroad entitlements long after the original business need has disappeared. NHI Management Group has shown in its Ultimate Guide to NHIs that identity sprawl compounds when governance is periodic instead of continuous. The same dynamic appears in human access campaigns: the control exists, but the operating model overwhelms it. OWASP’s OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 reinforces the broader lesson that identity decisions need to be risk-aware, not purely administrative. In practice, many security teams encounter mass approvals only after an audit cycle has already normalized them as a “successful” certification outcome.

How It Works in Practice

Mass approvals usually emerge from a combination of scale, ambiguity, and reviewer fatigue. The queue is often built from inherited entitlements, role bundles, and duplicated accounts, so the reviewer sees hundreds of entries that look semantically identical but are not equally risky. Without context such as last use, business owner, system criticality, or upstream dependency, the safest human shortcut is to approve or defer.

Operationally, strong programs reduce this failure mode by changing what the reviewer sees and when the decision is made:

• Pre-group access by application, role, owner, and risk so reviewers can reject bad clusters quickly.
• Surface usage telemetry, last sign-in, and privilege elevation history next to each item.
• Expire low-confidence access before the review starts, rather than asking humans to clean up obvious deadwood.
• Route high-risk entitlements to tighter approvers and preserve evidence for exceptions.

Current guidance suggests that access reviews work better when they are continuous and event-driven, not annual and batch-based. NHI Management Group’s NHI Lifecycle Management Guide reflects the same governance principle for machine identities: review what changed, not everything at once. That aligns with OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and reduces the chance that reviewers approve by habit instead of evidence. These controls tend to break down when entitlement data is fragmented across too many systems because reviewers cannot trust the context presented to them.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter review controls often increase operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance certification rigor against reviewer capacity and business continuity. The biggest tradeoff is that deeper context and shorter cycles improve decision quality, but they also demand cleaner entitlement data, better ownership metadata, and more automation.

There is no universal standard for this yet, but best practice is evolving in three common directions. First, organisations are shrinking the review surface by removing dormant access before certification begins. Second, they are replacing broad attestations with focused campaigns for high-risk systems, privileged roles, or regulated data. Third, they are using analytics to suppress obviously low-risk items so reviewers spend time where judgment actually matters.

One useful signal is whether the approval rate stays near 100% even when the population changes. If every campaign ends with near-total approval, the issue is often not reviewer discipline but campaign design. NHIMG’s 52 NHI Breaches Analysis shows how identity control failures tend to accumulate when governance is treated as a checkbox. The same pattern applies here: mass approvals are usually a symptom of overbroad certification scope, not a sign that access is perfectly clean.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• When should organizations review access controls?
• When should organisations expand access review scope instead of increasing review volume?
• How should insurers govern access during large core-system modernisation projects?
• Why do access reviews often approve access that should be removed?