Compliance pressure is exposing weak identity and secrets controls

At a glance

What this is: This is an analysis of how compliance frameworks are forcing tighter control over identities, secrets, keys, certificates and privileged access, and why weak governance in those areas now becomes a regulatory exposure as well as a security one.

Why it matters: IAM, PAM and NHI teams need to treat auditability, rotation and lifecycle control as core governance requirements because the same weak points regulators expect to see controlled are also the attack paths adversaries exploit.

👉 Read Akeyless's analysis of compliance pressure on identity and secrets controls

Context

Compliance pressure is surfacing a familiar identity security problem: organisations are still struggling to govern who or what can access sensitive systems, how long that access lasts, and how it is audited. In this article, identity and secrets management are the control plane, not a side effect of compliance.

The core issue is that modern regulations increasingly expect proof of control over machine identities, secrets, keys, certificates and privileged access. That expectation matters across NHI, workload identity, and human-access programmes because weak lifecycle governance in any one of them undermines the audit story.

Akeyless positions its platform as a way to centralise those controls, but the deeper point is broader than any one vendor. Compliance has become a test of whether identity governance is real enough to survive scrutiny, not just a checkbox exercise.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when secrets management is separated from identity governance?

A: When secrets management is separated from identity governance, credentials can outlive approvals, regions, or vendor relationships. That creates a mismatch between who is supposed to control access and who actually can. The result is weak revocation, poor auditability, and higher risk in distributed estates.

Q: When do privileged credentials become a regulatory problem as well as a security risk?

A: Privileged credentials cross into regulatory risk when they are not time-bound, not auditable or not tied to an accountable owner. At that point, the issue is not only exposure to attackers. It is the organisation’s inability to demonstrate controlled access and lifecycle governance for regulated systems.

Q: What are the most common compliance mistakes teams make with machine identities?

A: Teams often fail to inventory machine identities as first-class assets, then miss rotation, expiry and offboarding because those controls were built for humans. The result is that service accounts and certificates keep working long after the business need has changed, which undermines both security posture and audit readiness.

Q: How should security teams balance auditability with zero-knowledge controls?

A: Auditability and zero-knowledge are complementary when the organisation can still prove who accessed what, when and under which authority without exposing raw secrets. The goal is to preserve evidence of control while reducing custody of sensitive material, not to trade one requirement for the other.

Technical breakdown

Why secrets and machine identity controls now sit in the compliance path

Regulators are not only concerned with data protection in the abstract. They are increasingly focused on the mechanisms that protect access to data and systems, which is why secrets, machine identities, certificates and privileged credentials have moved into the compliance surface. In practice, this means a leaked API key, a stale service account, or a certificate that outlives its intended use can become both a security incident and an audit failure. The technical point is simple: if an identity or secret can still authenticate, it is still in scope.

Practical implication: Map every regulated control requirement to the specific identity or secret type that proves it is governed.

Why auditability depends on lifecycle control, not just logging

Audit trails matter, but they are not enough if the underlying credential lifecycle is broken. Rotation, revocation, expiry, ownership and offboarding determine whether a log entry describes controlled access or unmanaged access. For NHIs especially, lifecycle gaps create a false sense of compliance because the evidence exists while the exposure remains. Certificates, keys and secrets that are not centrally governed tend to fragment across tools, making it harder to prove who owned them, when they changed, and whether they were retired on time.

Practical implication: Tie audit evidence to issuance, rotation and revocation events, not only to access logs.

Why zero-knowledge and just-in-time access change the control story

Zero-knowledge designs and Just-in-Time access reduce how much sensitive material exists in a reusable form and for how long. That matters because many compliance regimes assume access should be tightly scoped, time-bound and provable. In a regulated environment, the value is not just reducing attack surface. It is also making access patterns easier to explain to auditors, easier to bound operationally, and easier to distinguish from standing privilege that lingers after the task is complete.

Practical implication: Prefer ephemeral access paths and customer-controlled cryptographic handling where regulators expect least privilege and strong custody.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The objective is to turn unmanaged identity and secrets into durable access to regulated systems, sensitive data or privileged administrative functions.

1. Entry often begins with exposed credentials, such as a leaked API key, unmanaged certificate or overprivileged token that can still authenticate to critical systems.
2. Escalation occurs when the identity has broader access than the task requires, allowing the attacker or misuse path to move from one system to many.
3. Impact follows when weak lifecycle control prevents rapid revocation, audit reconstruction or containment across cloud, CI/CD and regulated workloads.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Azure Key Vault Contributor escalation 2024: Datadog found Azure Key Vault Contributor could add itself to access policies and read every secret, key and certificate in a vault.
• BeyondTrust breach 2024: A stolen BeyondTrust Remote Support API key let a China state-sponsored actor reset accounts and reach US Treasury workstations in 2024.

Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 150+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Compliance is exposing identity governance debt, not creating a new problem. The frameworks named in the article are simply making visible what security teams already know: uncontrolled secrets, machine identities and privileged access are operational weaknesses. When DORA, NIS2, GDPR, the EU Cyber Resilience Act and PCI DSS all point at the same control gaps, the issue is not policy overlap. The issue is that the programme has been allowed to drift away from enforceable identity governance.

Identity and secrets security has become a regulated control plane. The article correctly frames access, rotation, auditability and lifecycle as the substance behind compliance. That matters because these controls decide whether an organisation can demonstrate custody over credentials, keys and certificates, or merely claim it after the fact. Practitioners should read this as a shift from evidence collection to control enforcement.

Weak lifecycle governance is now a compliance failure mode in its own right. A certificate that expires late, a token that never rotates, or a service account that remains active after a project ends is not just a security hygiene issue. It is proof that governance and operational reality have diverged. The practitioner lesson is that access governance must be measurable across issuance, use and retirement, or auditability is cosmetic.

Machine identity deserves the same governance discipline as human access. The article’s emphasis on cloud, Kubernetes, DevOps and AI-driven environments reflects a broader change in enterprise identity fabric. Those systems authenticate, retrieve data and trigger workflows without human involvement, which means the old assumption that identity is manually managed no longer holds. The implication is that NHI and workload identity controls must be treated as a first-class compliance domain, not as infrastructure detail.

Zero-knowledge architecture sharpens the custody question, but it does not replace governance. Customer-controlled cryptographic fragments reduce third-party exposure and help with regulated custody expectations. However, the real differentiator for practitioners is that the architecture makes ownership boundaries more explicit, which is only useful if lifecycle, rotation and access decisions are already disciplined. The control problem remains governance first, technology second.

From our research library:

• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• Read next: Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks

What this signals

Identity compliance is becoming a lifecycle problem, not a checkbox problem. Organisations that still treat secrets, keys and certificates as isolated technical assets will struggle to satisfy audit expectations that now extend across issuance, rotation, revocation and ownership. The operational signal is clear: if a control cannot be evidenced through its full lifecycle, it will eventually be questioned in review.

Privileged access and machine identity controls are converging. The same governance model now needs to cover human admins, service accounts, API keys and certificates because all of them can become the access path into regulated systems. That convergence changes programme design: identity teams need shared policy, shared inventory and shared audit evidence across human and non-human access.

Certificate lifecycle management is part of compliance readiness. Expired or unmanaged certificates are not just availability risks, they are proof that identity governance is incomplete. For regulated environments, the stronger pattern is to govern certificates alongside keys, secrets and access approvals so the audit story matches operational reality.

For practitioners

• Map compliance obligations to identity control types Create a framework-to-control matrix that links each obligation to the specific secrets, keys, certificates, NHIs or privileged accounts that prove compliance.
• Inventory non-human identities and long-lived secrets Document where service accounts, API keys, tokens and certificates live, who owns them, how they are rotated and when they are retired.
• Replace standing privilege with time-bound access Use Just-in-Time access and Zero Standing Privilege where privileged access is only needed for short operational windows.
• Tie audit evidence to lifecycle events Ensure issuance, rotation, revocation and expiry events are logged in a way that can be shown to auditors without manual reconstruction.

Key takeaways

• Compliance pressure is exposing a governance gap in how organisations control identities, secrets, keys, certificates and privileged access.
• The security and audit problem is not theoretical, because exposed secrets, unmanaged machine identities and excessive privilege are already the risks regulators are targeting.
• Lifecycle control, not just logging, is what turns identity security into evidence that can survive audit scrutiny.

Key terms

• Machine Identity: The digital identity of a machine, device, or workload, such as a server, container, or VM, used to authenticate it within a network. Sometimes used interchangeably with NHI, though NHI is the broader category.
• Zero-Knowledge Architecture: A design pattern in which the service provider cannot decrypt customer data because it never receives the keys needed to do so. The provider may store encrypted data and coordinate sync or processing, but it remains technically unable to read plaintext unless the architecture is broken.
• Certificate Lifecycle Management: The governance of digital certificates from issuance through renewal and revocation, ensuring certificates are valid, monitored, and rotated before expiry. Expired certificates are a leading cause of outages and unplanned security gaps.
• Zero Standing Privilege: A control model in which an identity does not keep persistent access unless it is actively needed. For NHIs, this means credentials and permissions are issued for a narrow task and then removed. It reduces the time window and reuse value of stolen access.

What's in the full article

Akeyless's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• Framework-by-framework discussion of how DORA, NIS2, GDPR, PCI DSS and ISO 27001 map to identity and secrets controls
• Product-specific examples of Zero-Knowledge handling for secrets, keys and certificates across regulated environments
• Description of the vendor's platform capabilities for rotation, audit logging and privilege reduction
• Examples of how the vendor positions machine identity security in cloud, DevOps and AI workflows

👉 Akeyless's full article covers framework-by-framework compliance detail and platform-specific governance examples.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity lifecycle are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building or maturing an IAM programme, it is worth exploring.