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12/06/2026 12:48 am
TL;DR: Compliance management systems centralise policies, controls, audits, and reporting to help organisations track regulatory obligations, manage risk, and improve visibility across access and evidence workflows, according to Zluri. For IAM teams, the real issue is that compliance only holds when identity reviews, access control, and audit evidence are operationally connected.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Security & Compliance Compliance Management System: Key Insights for Implementation
By the numbers:
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations align compliance management with identity governance?
A: Treat identity data as the source of compliance evidence.
Q: What breaks when NHIs are excluded from compliance reviews?
A: You lose visibility into the identities that often carry the highest privilege and the least human oversight.
Q: Why do access reviews often fail to produce real compliance?
A: Access reviews fail when the organisation reviews records instead of live entitlement state.
Practitioner guidance
- Tie compliance controls to identity lifecycle events Record every joiner, mover, leaver, access grant, entitlement change, key rotation, and revocation as an auditable event so evidence is generated when the control changes, not reconstructed later.
- Include NHIs in every compliance review cycle Extend access certification to service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates, then verify that ownership, business purpose, and expiration are current before sign-off.
- Track revocation as a first-class compliance control Measure whether offboarding, token revocation, and secret rotation completed successfully, because delayed removal of access is a common source of audit failure and residual risk.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- A step-by-step compliance management system implementation sequence for teams building a programme from scratch
- A software comparison section that shows how different CMS tools handle reporting, audits, and workflow centralisation
- Practical examples of regulatory alignment for GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, and PCI DSS environments
- The article's own walkthrough of how Zluri positions automated access review inside compliance operations
👉 Read Zluri's guide to implementing a compliance management system →
Compliance management systems and IAM: where the governance gap shows?
Explore further
12/06/2026 10:18 am
Compliance management fails when identity evidence is fragmented. A CMS can only prove control effectiveness if access data, policy execution, and revocation records are connected. In practice, many programmes still separate audit workflows from IAM and secrets management, which means the evidence trail is incomplete before the auditor even asks for it. The conclusion is straightforward: compliance is only as credible as the identity records behind it.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can security teams prove a compliance management system is working?
A: Look for control evidence that survives audit scrutiny: complete identity inventories, timely revocation, current ownership for non-human accounts, and reports that reconcile with actual access in production. If those signals do not match, the CMS is documenting intent rather than governing access.
👉 Read our full editorial: Compliance management systems expose the identity governance gap
