Topic starter
20/08/2026 11:37 am
TL;DR: Venice.io argues that vault-based PAM leaves most privilege standing because it only secures credentials that are manually onboarded, while many cloud, SaaS, on-prem, machine, and AI-driven accounts remain outside that model. Zero standing privilege now depends on continuous discovery, contextual access decisions, and ephemeral privilege issuance, not vault checkout workflows alone.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Venice.io: “Vaults Won’t Get Us to Zero Standing Privilege”.
By the numbers:
Key questions
Q: What breaks when credential vaulting is used as a substitute for zero standing privilege?
A: Vaulting can protect a secret while it is stored, but it does not remove the secret or the privilege behind it.
Q: Why do vaults and JIT wrappers still leave standing access in place?
A: Because they often change the timing of access without changing the account’s baseline permissions.
Q: How do security teams know whether PAM is actually reducing privilege risk?
A: Measure how much privileged access is permanent, how often elevation is task-scoped, and whether session activity matches the approved purpose.
Practitioner guidance
- Map standing privilege outside the vault Inventory cloud, SaaS, on-prem, machine, and AI-driven accounts that still retain elevated rights even when secrets are vaulted.
- Rebuild JIT as ephemeral privilege issuance Replace timer-based wrappers around permanent accounts with access that is created for the task and revoked when the task completes.
- Prioritise non-rotatable legacy accounts Identify applications that block automatic rotation and treat them as high-risk exceptions, because static credentials in those systems remain vaulted on paper but permanent in practice.
Bottom line: Vaults can reduce secret handling risk without removing the privileges attached to the account behind the secret.
What's in the full article
Venice.io's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The article’s argument for why vault-based PAM cannot discover unmanaged privileged identities across cloud, SaaS, on-prem, and AI-driven accounts.
- The description of how legacy applications prevent automatic rotation and force static credentials to remain in practice even when they are vaulted.
- The operational case for contextual access decisions and ephemeral privilege issuance as the basis for zero standing privilege.
- The examples showing why time-bound access wrappers still leave the underlying privilege intact.
👉 Read Venice.io's analysis of why vaults do not deliver zero standing privilege →
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20/08/2026 11:37 am
Vaulting credentials is not the same as eliminating privilege: The control only governs checkout and storage, while the authorization layer beneath it can remain fully intact. That distinction is why organisations can look disciplined on paper and still retain a wide standing-privilege footprint in practice. The implication is that PAM programmes must be evaluated on privilege state, not vault presence.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should organisations do first when legacy applications cannot support automatic rotation?
A: Treat those applications as governance exceptions and identify the privileged accounts they force to remain static. Then add compensating oversight for the residual access, because rotating the credential is not enough when the application itself preserves standing privilege.
👉 Read our full editorial: Vaults do not deliver zero standing privilege in modern enterprises