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08/07/2026 6:51 pm
TL;DR: Identity governance fails when it treats low-risk and high-risk access as structurally equal, because uniform review cycles obscure the small set of entitlements that drive most exposure, according to OpenIAM. The practical issue is not control absence but control distortion: organisations need differentiated governance if they want to see what actually matters.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by OpenIAM: Why Equal Treatment of Access Leads to Unequal Risk in Identity Governance
By the numbers:
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations handle access reviews when privilege levels vary widely?
A: They should stop using one uniform certification path for every entitlement.
Q: Why does treating all access the same create governance risk?
A: Because access is not equally risky.
Q: How do you know if an access review programme is losing signal?
A: Look for repetitive approvals, thin reviewer comments, and consistently high completion rates on sensitive entitlements.
Practitioner guidance
- Segment access reviews by risk tier Separate privileged roles, sensitive-data access, and routine entitlements into different certification paths so reviewers can apply different scrutiny levels to different consequences.
- Prioritise review queues by blast radius Rank entitlements by system criticality, modification power, and downstream impact before the campaign begins, then surface the highest-consequence items first.
- Tag entitlements with governance context Mark accounts and permissions with risk metadata such as privileged, third-party, production, or data-bearing so the review flow can distinguish them without manual guesswork.
What's in the full article
OpenIAM's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How the vendor frames uniform certification workflows and the specific distortion they create in large identity programmes
- The article's own explanation of access risk distribution across privileged roles, routine entitlements, and sensitive systems
- The full comparison between uniform governance and risk-aware governance, including the reviewer experience trade-offs
- OpenIAM's closing perspective on why scale makes differentiated access review harder to ignore
👉 Read OpenIAM's analysis of why equal treatment creates unequal access risk →
Access risk distribution in IAM: where equal treatment fails?
Explore further
08/07/2026 7:12 pm
False equivalence is the governance assumption that access is structurally equal, and it breaks identity programmes by design. That assumption was useful when access sets were smaller and less differentiated, but it fails once privileged roles, routine entitlements, and machine identities coexist in the same workflow. The implication is not simply to add another control. It is to stop treating sameness as a governance virtue.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, which helps explain why entitlement risk often persists long after access should have been removed.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when high-risk access is approved through a uniform process?
A: Accountability sits with the governance owners who designed the certification model and the business approvers who accepted it. Frameworks such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 expect access governance to support risk-informed decisions, not just completed workflows. If the process treats unequal risk as equal, the accountability gap is part of the design.
👉 Read our full editorial: False equivalence in identity governance creates uneven access risk
