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06/07/2026 9:44 am
TL;DR: Manual access reviews often fail because organisations can show activity but not evidence, leaving audit gaps, lingering access, and remediation uncertainty, according to Zluri. Systematic reviews turn access governance into provable security, compliance, and cost control rather than spreadsheet-driven guesswork.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Security & Compliance, Why (Automated) User Access Reviews Are Important
By the numbers:
- We surveyed 215 compliance and security leaders about whether they believe airtight access review processes are required to comply with regulations.
- Nearly all agreed, 91% said access reviews are critical for compliance.
- For a 1,000-employee company, assume 200 SaaS applications, conservative 5 unused licenses per app, and average cost $50/user/month.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams automate access reviews without losing audit evidence?
A: Security teams should automate access reviews by preserving the full decision trail, not just the final result.
Q: Why do access reviews matter for third-party users and contractors?
A: Third-party users and contractors create the highest drift risk because their access often outlives the business relationship that justified it.
Q: What do organisations get wrong about periodic access recertification?
A: They often treat recertification as a paperwork exercise instead of a control that must change entitlements.
Practitioner guidance
- Centralise review evidence in one governed workflow Capture reviewer identity, approval status, exception rationale, and remediation timestamps in the same system so auditors do not need to reconstruct the control from emails and spreadsheets.
- Tie every entitlement review to a remediation outcome Require every out-of-policy access decision to generate a tracked removal or downgrade task, and keep the task linked to the original review record until closure.
- Prioritise high-risk identities first Start with contractors, terminated users, dormant accounts, and administrative entitlements across business-critical applications because these are the fastest paths to exposure and audit failure.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- A walkthrough of how the access review workflow is expected to reduce manual reconciliation across applications.
- Specific evidence examples auditors ask for, including attestation records, remediation proof, and timestamped review trails.
- Operational scenarios showing how review cadence affects dormant accounts, contractor access, and license waste.
- The vendor's framing of how automated reviews fit into broader compliance and governance work.
👉 Read Zluri's analysis of why automated access reviews matter →
Automated access reviews: why proof, not process, matters?
Explore further
06/07/2026 10:01 am
Access review failure is usually an evidence problem before it is a security problem. The article shows that many teams can point to review activity but cannot prove attestation quality, remediation closure, or audit-ready trails. That is the real governance gap, because identity controls that cannot be evidenced do not survive compliance scrutiny. Practitioners should treat evidence integrity as part of the control, not an afterthought.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 1 in 4 organisations are already investing in dedicated NHI security capabilities, with an additional 60% planning to do so within the next twelve months, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- Only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in their ability to secure NHIs, compared to nearly 1 in 4 for securing human identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own access review remediation when multiple teams are involved?
A: Ownership should sit with the control owner, usually IAM or IGA, even when business managers approve access and application teams execute changes. If ownership is split too loosely, review findings stall in tickets and never reach closure. Clear accountability is what turns access review findings into actual entitlement reduction.
👉 Read our full editorial: Automated access reviews expose the gap between policy and proof
