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08/06/2026 4:25 pm
TL;DR: Access certification formalizes who should keep access, who should lose it, and how teams prove least privilege across users, roles, and systems, according to StrongDM. The governance value is real, but manual review cadences, stale inventories, and weak visibility still leave too much room for privilege creep and audit theatre.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by StrongDM: What Is Access Certification? Process, Benefits & Best Practices
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams run access certification for privileged accounts?
A: Start with a complete inventory of privileged entitlements, then review each account against current business need, task scope, and ownership.
Q: Why do access certification programmes fail in complex environments?
A: They fail when reviewers cannot see the full access picture across cloud platforms, databases, and service accounts.
Q: How do organisations know if access certification is actually working?
A: Look for shrinking numbers of standing privileges, faster revocation after review decisions, and fewer orphaned or overprivileged accounts over time.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory all live entitlements before the next review cycle Build the certification scope from a centralized view of cloud, database, privileged, and service account access so reviewers are judging actual entitlements, not stale exports.
- Separate standing access from task-scoped access Classify privileges into durable, temporary, and exceptional access so the campaign can focus on removing persistent entitlements instead of rubber-stamping short-lived ones.
- Tie certification outcomes directly to revocation workflows Make every denied or unrenewed entitlement trigger automatic removal, ticket closure, and audit logging so review decisions actually change access state.
What's in the full article
StrongDM's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step guidance for running periodic and event-based certification campaigns across users, roles, and resource-scoped access.
- Practical examples of manual, automated, and hybrid review models, including where each works best in real environments.
- Implementation detail on using IGA, CASB, PAM, and API connectors to centralise evidence and route review tasks.
- Operational workflows for combining JIT permissions, live logs, and instant revocation inside a certification programme.
👉 Read StrongDM's guide on access certification, least privilege, and review workflows →
Access certification and least privilege: what IAM teams need now?
Explore further
08/06/2026 6:03 pm
Access certification is really a control over privilege persistence, not a review ritual. The article frames certification as a formal way to validate whether access should continue, but the deeper governance issue is whether an organisation can prove that access has a legitimate lifecycle at all. In NHI and human IAM alike, stale access becomes a standing risk when no one can reliably confirm when it should end. Practitioners should treat certification as evidence of privilege expiration discipline, not as a calendar exercise.
A few things that frame the scale:
- From our research: 70% of organisations grant AI systems more access than they would give a human employee performing the exact same job, according to the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
- Only 44% of organisations have implemented any policies to manage their AI agents, despite 92% agreeing that governing AI agents is critical to enterprise security.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What is the difference between access certification and access review?
A: Access certification is the formal, periodic process used to validate and renew access with documented evidence. Access review is often looser and may be triggered by events or internal checks without the same governance rigor. Certification is the stronger control when an organisation needs audit-ready proof that access decisions were made deliberately and recorded.
👉 Read our full editorial: Access certification is the control plane for least privilege at scale
