Identity and access security will define resilience in critical industries

At a glance

What this is: This is Imprivata’s 2026 outlook for critical industries, arguing that identity, access, and intelligent automation will anchor resilience and efficiency.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and lifecycle teams will need to support passwordless access, third-party governance, and AI-enabled workflows without weakening control.

By the numbers:

• 92% of organisations expose NHIs to third parties, raising concerns about supply chain security.
• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
• 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys.

👉 Read Imprivata's 2026 identity and access security predictions for critical industries

Context

Critical industries are moving toward an identity-first operating model because legacy access controls cannot keep pace with mobile workforces, AI-driven change, and increasingly distributed workflows. In that environment, identity and access management becomes the control plane that ties people, devices, services, and automation together.

The article’s central claim is that 2026 will reward organisations that connect security, workflow intelligence, and user experience rather than treating them as separate programmes. For IAM, PAM, and identity architects, that means access design now has to support both operational speed and continuous trust.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams implement passwordless authentication without creating new blind spots?

A: Security teams should pair passwordless authentication with identity threat detection, device binding, and strong recovery controls. Passwordless reduces shared-secret risk, but it only improves resilience if the surrounding monitoring can distinguish legitimate access from anomalous behaviour and if fallback paths do not reintroduce weaker credentials.

Q: Why do third-party and privileged accounts need the same governance as employee access?

A: Third-party and privileged accounts often have broader reach and weaker day-to-day oversight than employee accounts. When they are excluded from lifecycle management, recertification, and monitoring, they become a durable exposure path. Treating them separately usually creates the very blind spots attackers look for.

Q: What breaks when identity and access policies are too generic for frontline workflows?

A: Generic policies break when they cannot represent real operational context, such as role changes, site-specific tasks, or urgent exceptions. Users then bypass controls or create manual workarounds. In practice, that means the security model no longer matches how work actually gets done.

Q: Who should be accountable for modernising identity controls in critical industries?

A: Accountability should sit with the teams that own identity governance, access security, and operational risk together, not in isolated tool silos. Passwordless, third-party access, and workflow intelligence all affect business continuity, so the programme owner must be able to measure both control strength and operational impact.

Technical breakdown

Passwordless authentication and real-time risk intelligence

Passwordless authentication replaces shared secrets with biometrics, device-bound passkeys, and cryptographic factors that are not reusable in the way passwords are. The practical difference is not just fewer resets. It is a smaller credential theft surface and a cleaner signal set for identity threat detection and response, because authentication events can be tied more tightly to device and behaviour context. In critical industries, that matters when workers are mobile and support pressure is high. Passwordless only holds if the surrounding telemetry can spot anomalies quickly enough to stop abuse without forcing users back into less secure fallback paths.

Practical implication: pair passwordless rollout with identity telemetry and ITDR so higher assurance does not create blind spots.

Third-party and privileged access as a shared governance problem

The article treats contractors, vendors, and service partners as a core access class, not an edge case. That is the right framing. Third-party and privileged access often sit outside normal employee workflows, which makes them harder to verify, scope, and monitor. In healthcare, manufacturing, and public safety, these accounts frequently carry elevated reach into operational systems while remaining weakly bound to lifecycle governance. The result is not only excess privilege, but also a governance gap between who owns the access and who can actually remove it when relationships change.

Practical implication: bring external and elevated access into the same lifecycle, monitoring, and recertification process as internal identities.

Identity as the control plane for workflow intelligence

Workflow intelligence becomes security-relevant when identity carries context about role, task, device, and operational state. That is how identity stops being a login layer and starts acting as a control plane. In modern environments, especially where AI is helping coordinate work, access decisions need to reflect what the user or workload is trying to do, not just who they are on paper. Generic horizontal platforms struggle here because the access model has to match the actual workflow, including frontline exceptions and regulated operational steps. Without that fit, organisations create workarounds that weaken governance.

Practical implication: design access around actual workflow states, not static role assumptions or one-size-fits-all policy sets.

Threat narrative

Attacker objective: The attacker seeks durable access into critical operational systems by exploiting identities that are easier to reuse, overextend, or hide than they should be.

1. Entry begins when attackers abuse weak or reusable credentials, including passwords and externally exposed access pathways, to get a foothold in critical industry environments.
2. Escalation follows when privileged or third-party accounts provide broader reach than intended, especially where visibility and monitoring are limited.
3. Impact lands as operational disruption, credential misuse, and compromised trust across distributed systems that depend on identity for secure access.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Cisco DevHub NHI breach — IntelBroker exploited exposed Cisco credentials, API tokens and keys in DevHub.
• IOS app secrets leakage report — iOS apps leaking hardcoded secrets and credentials endangering user privacy.

Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Passwordless is becoming a control plane issue, not just an authentication upgrade. The article is right to connect passwordless adoption with real-time risk intelligence, because the value is not in removing passwords alone. It is in reducing credential reuse while improving the quality of identity signals available to detection and response teams. For practitioners, the question is whether authentication design is feeding governance, or just improving the login experience.

Third-party access remains the most structurally under-governed identity class in critical industries. Contractors and service partners often carry high-value access while sitting outside the employee-centric controls that mature IAM programmes were built around. That gap is not a tooling issue alone. It is a lifecycle ownership problem that becomes more dangerous as operations become more distributed. Practitioners should treat external access as a first-class governance domain, not an exception path.

Identity is now the practical bridge between workflow intelligence and security accountability. As AI helps shape work execution, identity becomes the layer that makes access context-aware without collapsing into ad hoc exceptions. That raises the bar for IAM, because role alone is no longer enough to describe entitlement in frontline or hybrid environments. The implication for practitioners is that workflow nuance must be captured in policy, or it will leak into manual bypasses.

Purpose-built access models are replacing generic platforms because operational context now determines control quality. The article’s point about industry-informed architectures reflects a wider market truth: one-size-fits-all identity design fails when workflows vary by site, role, device, and urgency. This is especially visible in healthcare and manufacturing, where friction quickly becomes a security bypass. Practitioners should re-evaluate whether their current platform can model context without turning every exception into custom logic.

Measurable ROI in digital trust will come from fewer compensating controls, not more of them. The strongest identity programmes will connect trust signals, workflow speed, and access governance into one operating model. That is what allows teams to reduce resets, lower exposure, and still support frontline work. The implication for practitioners is clear: security that adds friction without improving assurance will lose the operational case.

From our research:

• 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after the targeted organisation is notified, which shows how slowly remediation can move once exposure is discovered.
• For the broader control picture, read 52 NHI Breaches Analysis for the breach patterns that repeatedly turn exposed access into operational compromise.

What this signals

Third-party access will keep exposing the weakest seam in identity programmes. The more critical industries rely on external providers, the more they need lifecycle control, continuous review, and revocation discipline that extends beyond employee identities. For teams building their programme, the test is whether vendor access is governed as tightly as internal privilege, or left to ticket-based exceptions that age into risk.

The growth of passwordless is a useful signal only if it comes with better identity telemetry. Without that layer, organisations simply move from one credential shape to another. Teams should expect more pressure to connect authentication, ITDR, and workflow intelligence into a single operating view, especially where mobile work and frontline access are the norm.

Identity is becoming the operating language of digital trust. That means security teams need to think less in terms of isolated access events and more in terms of whether the identity fabric can represent context, responsibility, and task boundaries. If it cannot, the organisation will compensate with manual approvals, local exceptions, and fragile workarounds that erode both trust and productivity.

For practitioners

• Accelerate passwordless with telemetry attached Roll out passkeys, biometrics, or device-bound factors only where identity telemetry and ITDR can detect anomalies fast enough to replace password-era fallback behaviour.
• Reclassify third-party access as lifecycle-governed access Put vendors, contractors, and service partners into the same joiner-mover-leaver and recertification discipline you use for employees, including ownership for revocation when work ends.
• Map privileged workflows to actual operating context Document where role, device, site, and task conditions change access decisions, then use that map to remove generic policy exceptions that have become permanent workarounds.
• Measure identity control against operational outcomes Track reset volume, exception rates, third-party review completion, and time-to-revoke alongside security metrics so identity modernisation is judged on both safety and productivity.

Key takeaways

• Critical industry identity programmes are shifting from login control to operational resilience, with passwordless, privileged access, and workflow intelligence forming the new control plane.
• The biggest governance gap is not technology novelty but lifecycle and visibility failure across third-party and elevated access paths.
• Practitioners should measure identity modernisation by fewer exceptions, faster revocation, and stronger context-aware access rather than by adoption alone.

Key terms

• Passwordless Authentication: An authentication approach that removes passwords as the primary secret and replaces them with stronger factors such as biometrics, device-bound passkeys, or cryptographic assertions. The security value comes from reducing reusable credentials and making stolen secrets less useful to attackers.
• Third-Party Access: Access granted to vendors, contractors, or service partners that operates outside the employee access path. It often carries elevated privilege and weaker oversight, so it requires lifecycle ownership, review, and revocation controls that are as strict as internal access governance.
• Identity Threat Detection and Response: A set of monitoring and response practices that uses identity signals to detect suspicious access patterns and act quickly on them. It matters most when authentication is stronger but still needs telemetry to identify abuse, anomalous behaviour, or account misuse in real time.
• Workflow Intelligence: Context about role, task, device, location, and operational state that helps identity systems make access decisions aligned to real work. It is useful when access must adapt to frontline or distributed environments without turning every exception into a manual approval loop.

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 responsible for identity security strategy or NHI governance in your organisation, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by Imprivata: 2026 identity and access security predictions for critical industries. Read the original.