JIT access in zero trust: are your controls keeping up?

TL;DR: Just-in-time access narrows privilege windows for people, machines, APIs, and AI models by granting access only when needed and revoking it afterward, according to Delinea. That reduces exposure, but it also exposes the governance burden of policy design, approval logic, and auditability across mixed identity types.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Delinea: Just-in-time access: Strengthening security in a zero-trust world

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should security teams implement JIT access across human and machine identities?

A: Security teams should separate human request workflows from workload identity controls and treat service accounts, API keys, and AI systems as different actors.

Q: Why does JIT access fail when privilege is still effectively standing?

A: JIT fails when a temporary grant does not fully disappear from downstream systems, cached sessions, or inherited roles.

Q: How do organisations know if zero standing privilege is actually working?

A: They know it is working when access cannot be reused outside the intended task window and revocation is provable across every system that accepted the privilege.

Practitioner guidance

• Map every privileged path to a revocation checkpoint Document where elevated access is created, where it is consumed, and which systems must confirm that revocation actually propagated.
• Separate human and machine JIT workflows Do not force service accounts, API tokens, and AI workloads through the same request-and-approval pattern used for people.
• Validate zero standing privilege with session-level testing Run test cases that confirm access disappears before the next task can begin, not just after a nominal expiry timer.

What's in the full article

Delinea's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• A step-by-step explanation of how its JIT workflow grants and revokes access for different identity types.
• The specific approval and automation logic the vendor describes for time-bound privilege windows.
• Examples of how the vendor positions JIT across cloud, remote work, and automation use cases.
• The webinar and product context that sit behind the blog's broader access-control framing.

👉 Read Delinea's blog post on just-in-time access and zero standing privilege →

JIT access in zero trust: are your controls keeping up?

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