TL;DR: Privileged access management must evolve from protecting a fixed set of admin accounts to governing privileged users, credentials, cloud permissions, OT systems, and non-human identities across hybrid environments, according to Palo Alto Networks. The real shift is that privilege is becoming a dynamic control plane, so standing assumptions about least privilege, delegation, and review windows no longer hold.
At a glance
What this is: This is Palo Alto Networks' view that PAM now has to govern privilege as a dynamic control plane across cloud, OT, human users and non-human identities.
Why it matters: It matters because IAM and PAM teams can no longer treat privileged access as a narrow admin-account control problem when permissions are delegated across fast-changing environments and identity types.
By the numbers:
- over 8 in 10 IT leaders are adopting hybrid cloud environments.
Context
Privilege is no longer confined to a small set of administrative logins. In hybrid environments, access can be granted to developers, employees, service accounts and other non-human identities, and the same privilege path may move between cloud, OT and traditional IT estates.
That creates a governance problem for PAM programmes built around static account inventories and scheduled review cycles. The article's central claim is that privileged access now behaves like a control plane, which means entitlement scope, delegation and revocation have to be managed as a continuous identity security function rather than a narrow admin-control layer.
Key questions
Q: How should security teams govern privileged access in cloud and hybrid environments?
A: Teams should govern privileged access around runtime authorization, not just connectivity or login. That means scoping elevation to a specific task, setting an expiry, logging approvals, and revoking access automatically when work is complete. The goal is to reduce standing privilege and create evidence that can withstand incident review and audit.
Q: Why do standing privileges create more risk in hybrid environments?
A: Standing privileges persist across sessions, platforms, and operational handoffs, which expands the window for misuse. In hybrid estates, that persistence often survives automation boundaries and cloud transitions, so the same entitlement can be abused in more than one environment. The governance problem is not only exposure, but duration and reuse.
Q: What breaks when privileged service accounts are treated like user admin accounts?
A: Governance breaks because service accounts often need uninterrupted machine execution, not manual session approval. If teams apply human-centric PAM patterns to them, they either block operations or create exceptions that reintroduce standing privilege. The result is weak visibility into who or what can still reach critical systems.
Q: Should organisations rely on periodic access reviews for privileged accounts?
A: Periodic reviews are necessary but not sufficient when permissions change faster than the review cycle. They work best as a backstop, not as the primary detection mechanism for privilege drift. Organisations should combine reviews with continuous discovery so that the privileged inventory reflects current access, not last quarter's state.
How it works in practice
Why privilege becomes a control plane in hybrid environments
Privilege acts like a control plane when access decisions start shaping where work can run, what tools can be touched and how far an identity can move after initial authentication. In cloud and OT environments, delegation is often broader than legacy admin models assume, and the same permissions can be consumed by people, workloads and service identities. That collapses the old boundary between privileged users and privileged infrastructure. The practical result is that PAM scope has to follow the access path, not just the account label.
Practical implication: Map privilege by effective reach across environments, not by whether the subject is called an admin account.
Why standing privilege creates governance drift
Standing privilege is risky because it assumes the access scope granted at provisioning time still matches the task when it is later used. In practice, permissions expand, identities get reused across systems, and cloud teams add access faster than certifiers can review it. That means privilege drift can become normal state rather than exception. PAM has to treat entitlement scope as something that changes continuously, especially when cloud innovation pressure pushes teams toward broad, persistent permissions.
Practical implication: Review whether any privilege remains persistent simply because the original approval process was built for slower environments.
How non-human identities change privileged access design
Non-human identities include service accounts, API credentials, tokens and other machine identities that can carry privileged access without a human operator sitting behind every action. That changes PAM because approval, session oversight and offboarding must work for identities that do not follow employee lifecycle patterns. The control question becomes who owns the identity, what it can reach, and how quickly it can be revoked when the workload or integration changes. The article's direction is clear: privileged access now spans humans and machines in the same governance plane.
Practical implication: Extend privileged access inventory, ownership and revocation workflows to machine identities, not just human admins.
NHI Mgmt Group analysis
Privilege has become a control plane, not a user class. That shift matters because modern enterprise access is defined by what an identity can do across cloud, OT and integrated platforms, not just by whether the account belongs to an administrator. PAM programmes that still model privilege as a fixed list of high-value users miss the real governance surface. The implication is that privilege needs continuous scope management across identity types and environments.
Hybrid cloud breaks the old review cadence assumption. The article points to cloud adoption as the reason privilege is increasingly dynamic, which means access review windows can lag behind actual access use. When permissions are added and consumed faster than review cycles close, certification becomes a record of past state rather than current control. Practitioners should treat review cadence as a weak signal unless paired with runtime privilege governance.
Non-human identities are now part of privileged access governance by default. That is the key expansion many PAM programmes have not operationalised. If service accounts, automation identities and application credentials can reach the same sensitive systems as people, then ownership, offboarding and scope control must apply across all identity forms. The implication is that privileged access policy can no longer stop at the human admin boundary.
OT forces PAM to confront consequence density. In operational technology, privilege misuse can affect physical systems, not just digital data. That makes least privilege, delegation control and session oversight more consequential because the blast radius is tied to real-world operations. Practitioners should align privileged access controls to the operational criticality of the target system, not just to its technical classification.
Dynamic privilege demands a broader identity security model. The article's own framing implies PAM cannot stand alone as a point solution when identities, environments and attack methods all change together. The stronger model is one where PAM, identity governance and machine identity controls share a common view of who or what holds high-risk access. The implication for the field is convergence around unified privilege governance.
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: Privileged Access Management Guide
What this signals
Privilege now needs runtime governance, not just lifecycle governance. Access reviews still matter, but they are too slow to be the primary control when cloud teams, OT operators and machine identities can all exercise high-risk access in the same environment. Practitioners should shift to controls that observe privilege at issuance and during use, not only at certification time.
Unified privileged identity inventory is becoming the baseline control. If service accounts, delegated credentials and human admins are governed in separate silos, policy drift is guaranteed. The better model is a single view of ownership, scope and revocation for all identities that can reach sensitive infrastructure, which is why identity security programmes are converging around shared privilege telemetry.
For practitioners
- Expand the privileged identity inventory Document privileged users, credentials, service accounts and other non-human identities in one inventory so that ownership and review obligations are visible across environments.
- Reclassify cloud permissions by effective reach Assess cloud entitlements by what systems and data they can touch in practice, then remove broad standing access that exceeds the task boundary.
- Bring OT access into PAM governance Apply privileged session oversight and delegation rules to OT systems where privileged actions can change physical outcomes, not just digital state.
- Extend offboarding to machine identities Trigger revocation workflows for service accounts, API credentials and other non-human identities when applications, vendors or integrations are retired.
Key takeaways
- Privilege is no longer a narrow admin problem. It now covers cloud permissions, OT access, human users and non-human identities inside one governance model.
- Hybrid environments expose the weakness in static PAM assumptions. Access can expand faster than review cycles can validate it, especially where permissions are delegated broadly.
- The control question is shifting from who has an admin account to who can exercise high-risk reach. That changes inventory, session oversight and offboarding priorities.
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 and MITRE ATT&CK address the attack and risk surface, while NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 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-05 — Overprivileged NHI | The article expands PAM scope to non-human identities that carry excessive access. |
| NHI-10 — Human Use of NHI | Privilege is delegated across people and machine identities, which blurs human and NHI boundaries. | |
| Recommendation — Audit non-human identities for overprivileged access and reduce effective reach to task scope. Track when humans operate through non-human identities and bind approvals to the underlying owner. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | The article centers on privileged credentials and their governance across environments. |
| Recommendation — Manage privileged credentials with rotation, revocation and ownership controls under IA-5. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | The core issue is governing access entitlements as they expand across hybrid environments. |
| Recommendation — Continuously validate access permissions and entitlements against actual privilege use. | ||
| MITRE ATT&CK | TA0006;TA0008 — Credential Access; Lateral Movement | The article explicitly references attacker compromise, lateral movement and privilege escalation. |
| Recommendation — Map privileged-access detections to credential access and lateral movement tactics. | ||
Key terms
- Control Plane: The control plane is the set of actions that create, configure, or manage a service. For AI workloads, it covers deployment and administration of the model platform, while data-plane permissions govern what the service and its identities can read or process.
- Standing Privilege: Standing privilege is access that remains active even when no immediate task requires it. For NHI programmes, it is a common failure mode because long-lived credentials and persistent roles create unnecessary exposure. Reducing standing privilege usually means tighter expiry, on-demand access, and clearer review of who or what still needs access.
- Non-Human Identity (NHI): A digital identity assigned to a non-human entity such as a software application, service account, API key, bot, machine, or AI agent that enables it to authenticate and interact with systems without direct human involvement. NHIs now outnumber human identities in most enterprises by 25 to 50 times.
- Privilege Drift: Privilege drift is the gradual gap between the permissions an identity was meant to have and the permissions it actually retains. In AI agent environments, drift grows quickly because roles are reused, tasks change, and lifecycle reviews often lag behind deployment velocity.
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.
Published by the NHIMG editorial team on June 12, 2026.
Updated on October 10, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org