Third-party access in manufacturing is exposing identity control gaps

At a glance

What this is: This is an analysis of third-party access in manufacturing, showing that vendor reliance is outpacing identity controls and creating visibility, review, and offboarding gaps.

Why it matters: It matters because IAM, IGA, and PAM teams in industrial environments need continuous governance for external access, not periodic trust assumptions that break under OT and contractor churn.

By the numbers:

• 80% of manufacturers report increased demand for identity and access management solutions.
• 32% struggle with managing contractors and third-party access.

Context

Manufacturing third-party access is an identity governance problem first and an operational problem second. Vendors need remote access to keep plant equipment, software updates, and supply chains running, but the more those connections become routine, the less effective manual review and spreadsheet-led offboarding become.

The primary gap is visibility across external users, systems, and review cycles. In environments with shared workstations, rotating contractors, and blended IT/OT access, organisations lose track of who has access, what they can reach, and whether that access still matches the work being performed.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when vendor access reviews are handled manually at scale?

A: Manual reviews break when the organisation has too many vendors, too much access churn, or too many systems to reconcile consistently. Review evidence becomes stale, exceptions are missed, and offboarding lags behind business change. The result is not just operational inefficiency, but persistent access that no one actively owns.

Q: Why does fourth-party risk create outsized security and compliance exposure in manufacturing supply chains?

A: Fourth parties sit outside direct contracts and oversight, yet they can still handle sensitive production data, infrastructure, and services that affect your business. If one of those hidden providers is compromised or non-compliant, the impact can cascade through the supply chain. The risk grows because organisations often do not know where data is stored or who can access it.

Q: How do security teams know whether vendor access is actually governed?

A: They should be able to answer three questions without delay: who has access, what they can reach, and how quickly access can be removed everywhere it exists. If the answers depend on spreadsheets, informal knowledge, or separate tool owners, governance is incomplete. A real control environment can prove scope and revocation end to end.

Q: How should manufacturers govern third-party access in converged IT/OT environments?

A: Treat vendor access as task-scoped access, not a standing support pathway. Limit it to the specific system, short duration and approved session needed for the job, then monitor activity and remove access when the task ends. This reduces the chance that remote support becomes an uncontrolled route into production.

Technical breakdown

Why manufacturing vendor access becomes continuous

Manufacturing environments move third-party access from exception handling into day-to-day operations. Vendors troubleshoot equipment, patch systems, monitor production, and support specialised applications, often across both IT and OT boundaries. That changes the identity problem: access is no longer a single approval event but a recurring entitlement that follows project phases, shift schedules, and remote support needs. When those sessions are managed through disconnected systems, the organisation loses an authoritative view of who is active and under what authority. Practical implication: treat third-party access as a governed lifecycle, not a one-time request.

Practical implication: model vendor access as a governed lifecycle, not a one-time approval.

Where manual reviews and offboarding fail

Periodic access reviews assume permissions remain stable long enough to be checked and removed on schedule. In manufacturing, that assumption often fails because contractors rotate frequently, access paths are distributed, and operational pressure favours continuity over cleanup. Spreadsheets drift, reviews arrive late, and deprovisioning can trail the actual end of the business need. The result is permission accumulation, which widens the attack surface without necessarily increasing business value. Practical implication: replace review-only governance with event-driven access lifecycle controls that follow vendor status changes.

Practical implication: replace review-only governance with event-driven lifecycle controls tied to vendor status changes.

How zero trust and centralised vendor data change the control model

The article frames continuous vendor risk assessment as a zero-trust-aligned approach, where access is verified, limited, and monitored rather than assumed. That requires more than policy language. It depends on centralised vendor records that answer who has access, to what systems, and for what purpose, plus automation that keeps provisioning and deprovisioning consistent as scale grows. In practice, centralisation gives security teams the audit trail and decision context needed to revoke access immediately when conditions change. Practical implication: use a single source of truth to connect access decisions to live vendor context.

Practical implication: use a single source of truth to connect access decisions to live vendor context.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Scania insurance portal breach 2025: An attacker used an external user login, likely stolen by infostealer malware, to take insurance claim documents from a Scania portal.
• Vercel Context.ai OAuth Supply Chain Breach: Shadow AI app Context.ai OAuth integration exposes Vercel customer data via unmanaged third-party token.

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

Third-party access in manufacturing is now a lifecycle governance problem, not a perimeter problem. The article shows that vendors are embedded in normal production operations, which means the identity model must follow the actual work, not the old assumption that external access is rare and easy to review. Manual processes break first when access becomes continuous and distributed. Practitioners should reframe third-party access as an identity lifecycle discipline with operational accountability.

Continuous vendor risk assessment is the named control shift this market is moving toward. Periodic reviews assume a stable access state, but manufacturing environments are defined by rotation, remote support, and changing project scope. That makes access context dependent, not static. The implication is that governance has to move from retrospective certification to state-aware access decisions that reflect current vendor purpose and environment.

Centralised vendor identity data is the control plane manufacturing teams keep missing. The article’s visibility problem is really a data problem: if no system can reliably answer who has access, what they can reach, and why, then review and offboarding become guesswork. That gap is especially damaging in IT/OT environments where open sessions and shared devices can hide access drift. Practitioners need one authoritative record before they can claim control.

OT and contractor churn expose the limits of spreadsheet-era governance. Manufacturing access patterns now depend on uptime pressure, rotating crews, and remote intervention, which means human process lag becomes security exposure. The issue is not just more users. It is more transient and operationally critical access than legacy governance models were built to track. Identity programmes should be measured by how quickly they remove unnecessary access after the business need changes.

Manufacturing security now depends on whether identity controls can keep pace with operational reality. The article makes clear that friction in access management leads to workarounds, and workarounds create hidden risk. That is where vendor management crosses into identity security proper: if controls slow the plant, they will be bypassed; if they do not centralise authority, they will drift. The practitioner conclusion is that governance must be fast enough to match production tempo.

From our research library:

• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• 92% of organisations expose NHIs to third parties, raising concerns about supply chain security, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• Read next: Third-Party, B2B and Contractor Access Guide

What this signals

Third-party access visibility debt: manufacturing programmes are carrying identity debt when they can no longer reliably answer who has access, what they can reach, and whether that access is still justified. That is not merely an audit issue. It means the access model is out of sync with how work actually happens on the plant floor.

The practical shift is toward state-aware governance, where access is revalidated against current task, site, and vendor status instead of assumed to remain valid between quarterly reviews. That aligns with Third-Party, B2B and Contractor Access Guide and with zero trust thinking: access should be narrow, explicit, and revocable as conditions change.

Manufacturing teams should expect the biggest gains from centralising vendor identity records before adding more policy layers. Once the authoritative record is missing, every downstream control inherits uncertainty, and manual review becomes a reporting exercise rather than a governance control.

For practitioners

• Implement continuous vendor access reviews Replace calendar-based certification with event-driven review triggers tied to vendor role changes, project completion, and plant access changes so permissions do not outlive the business need.
• Centralise third-party identity records Maintain a single authoritative vendor database that links each contractor to approved systems, purposes, sponsors, and expiry conditions, so access can be traced and revoked consistently.
• Automate offboarding for external users Trigger deprovisioning when contracts end, work orders close, or maintenance windows expire, and verify removal across remote access, privileged sessions, and shared endpoints.
• Enforce context-aware access decisions Require access to be revalidated against the current task, site, and time window, especially where vendors touch OT systems or use shared workstations on the plant floor.
• Measure vendor visibility gaps Track how many third-party accounts lack an owner, an expiry date, or a current business justification, and treat each one as a control failure rather than a reporting issue.

Key takeaways

• Manufacturing third-party access is expanding faster than manual governance can keep up, which leaves external users active without reliable visibility or timely removal.
• The article points to a measurable control gap, with 32% of manufacturers struggling to manage contractors and third-party access and 80% reporting greater demand for IAM solutions.
• Continuous vendor lifecycle governance, not periodic review alone, is the control shift that best matches IT/OT reality and reduces accumulated access exposure.

Key terms

• Third-Party Access: Third-party access is access granted to vendors, contractors, or support partners who are not direct employees of the organisation. It is higher risk than internal access because accountability, device assurance, and access duration are harder to control, so it usually requires tighter time limits and stronger auditability.
• Continuous vendor risk assessment: Continuous vendor risk assessment is the ongoing review of third-party security, privacy, operational, and compliance risk throughout the vendor relationship. It combines periodic evidence collection, control monitoring, incident signals, and contract changes to detect drift after onboarding. The goal is to keep vendor risk decisions current, not frozen at procurement.
• Identity Lifecycle Event: A business event that changes a person’s access, obligations, or record status, such as hiring, role change, or offboarding. In HR programmes, these events often drive entitlement changes and evidence requirements, so they need to be governed as part of the identity lifecycle rather than handled as isolated paperwork.
• Zero Trust: A security model that assumes no identity, human or non-human, should be trusted by default, even inside a network perimeter. Every access request must be verified, authorised, and continuously validated.

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.