They miss the fact that many high-impact actions now come from service accounts, automation identities, cloud roles, and AI-connected workflows. Those identities may not look like traditional administrators, but they can still change systems, move data, and widen blast radius if they are not governed as privileged.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
When teams frame PAM as a problem of locking down admin accounts, they miss the wider privileged surface created by service account, CI/CD tokens, cloud roles, and machine-to-machine workflows. That blind spot matters because privilege is defined by what an identity can do, not by whether a person logs into it. NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls treats access control as a broad governance problem, and NHIMG research shows why: NHI Mgmt Group reports that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, widening blast radius well beyond traditional administrators.
The operational mistake is assuming that “non-admin” means “low risk.” A deployment token that can promote code, a cloud role that can mint new credentials, or an API key embedded in automation can be just as dangerous as an interactive root login. If those identities are outside the PAM program, they often escape review, rotation, and offboarding entirely. In practice, many security teams encounter the real privilege pathway only after an API key, pipeline secret, or service account has already been abused to move laterally.
How It Works in Practice
Effective PAM for modern environments starts by classifying privilege by capability, not by account label. That means inventorying every identity that can alter systems, access sensitive data, issue tokens, approve deployments, or bypass normal application controls. The relevant question is not “Is this an admin account?” but “What high-impact action can this identity execute if compromised?”
Current best practice is to extend PAM controls across human and machine identities with the same discipline used for administrators. In practical terms, that includes:
- discovering service accounts, API keys, workload roles, and cloud-native identities
- placing secrets in managed vaults and rotating them on defined schedules
- using just-in-time elevation for tasks that truly need temporary privilege
- binding access to context such as workload, environment, and request purpose
- logging privileged actions centrally so entitlement drift is visible
This is where Zero Trust concepts become operationally useful. Instead of trusting a token because it belongs to automation, teams should validate identity, posture, and scope at request time. That aligns with NIST guidance on least privilege and continuous verification, and it maps cleanly to the kind of privileged workflow exposure described in BeyondTrust API key breach, where secret handling and access scope became the failure point rather than an obvious admin login.
Teams also need ownership. Every privileged non-human identity should have a named business owner, a technical custodian, and a revocation path tied to the system lifecycle. These controls tend to break down in fast-moving CI/CD environments because credentials are created faster than they are inventoried, rotated, or retired.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter PAM coverage often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance stronger control against deployment speed and automation reliability. That tradeoff is real, especially in environments where ephemeral workloads are created and destroyed continuously. The right answer is not to force every machine identity through the same approval flow used for humans, but to apply risk-based controls proportionate to what the identity can affect.
There is no universal standard for this yet, but current guidance suggests three common exceptions need special handling. First, break-glass accounts should be isolated, monitored, and tested, not treated as ordinary admin access. Second, third-party and vendor-managed identities need contractual and technical revocation controls, because they often sit outside internal review cycles. Third, high-frequency automation may need policy-driven authorization instead of manual approval, because human bottlenecks can make secure operations impossible.
NHIMG’s research also shows how often teams underestimate the scale of the problem: only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to NHI Mgmt Group. That gap makes it hard to prove whether a privilege is truly temporary, unnecessary, or already abandoned. The practical goal is to make privileged non-human access discoverable, attributable, and revocable before it becomes invisible infrastructure.
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, OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 and CSA MAESTRO address the attack and risk surface, while NIST AI RMF 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-01 | Covers discovery of non-human identities that PAM often misses. |
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | AGENT-03 | Agentic workflows create privileged actions outside traditional admin accounts. |
| CSA MAESTRO | MAESTRO-04 | Addresses authorization and control of autonomous and automated workloads. |
| NIST AI RMF | GOVERN | Requires accountable governance for AI-connected workflows with privileged reach. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Least-privilege access control applies equally to human and non-human identities. |
Apply least privilege and continuous review to service accounts, tokens, and cloud roles.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- What do teams get wrong when they treat ITDR like PAM or IGA?
- What do teams get wrong when they treat AI security as a detection-only problem?
- What do identity teams get wrong when they treat SOC and SOX as the same control problem?
- What do teams get wrong when they treat sso as a one-time integration?
