Topic starter
22/06/2026 9:52 am
TL;DR: Recurring access reviews are what keeps least privilege from decaying into privilege creep, because access typically expands across roles, systems, and temporary exceptions over time, according to SecurEnds. The governance problem is not initial provisioning but continuous validation, remediation, and evidence that permissions still match current business need.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by SecurEnds: “How Access Reviews Enforce Least Privilege in Modern Enterprises”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when access reviews are only run on a fixed schedule?
A: Fixed-cycle reviews encourage repetition, not judgment.
Q: Why do stale permissions create security risk even after onboarding was approved?
A: Because onboarding only proves access was justified once, not that it is still justified now.
Q: How do organisations know whether access reviews are working?
A: Access reviews are working when they lead to timely removals, reduced exception volume, and role definitions that stop accumulating unused rights.
Practitioner guidance
- Map recurring review cycles to the highest-risk entitlements Start with privileged accounts, sensitive systems, dormant accounts, and any access tied to financial, production, or regulated data paths.
- Track revocation completion, not just review completion Confirm that removals propagate into connected applications, cloud platforms, and databases after certification decisions are made.
- Group entitlements by role and business function Use role-based grouping to reduce reviewer fatigue and make it easier to spot old department access or duplicated permissions.
Bottom line: Least privilege fails when access is treated as a one-time approval instead of a recurring validation process.
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22/06/2026 10:30 am
Least privilege is not a provisioning control, it is a recertification control. The article’s central point is that access assigned at onboarding decays as roles, projects, and ownership change. That makes recurring validation the real control plane for least privilege, not the original approval record. The implication is that access governance must be measured by how well it catches drift, not by how clean the joiner process looked.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 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 is the difference between least privilege and access review?
A: Least privilege is the design principle that limits access to what is required, while access review is the governance activity that checks whether current access still matches that principle. You need both. One sets the target state, the other detects entitlement drift and exception creep.
👉 Read our full editorial: Access reviews and least privilege are only effective when recurring