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11/07/2026 8:27 pm
TL;DR: As cyber risk keeps rising, the article argues that organisations need security embedded across business processes, clearer policies, deputised advocates, and tighter control over who and what can access sensitive information, according to GlobalSign. The practical lesson is that identity governance has to cover both people and machines, not just perimeter defence.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by GlobalSign: cybersecurity priorities for stronger access control and policy governance
By the numbers:
- The cybersecurity industry is projected to rise to $90 billion worldwide just this year alone.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations govern machine authentication alongside human IAM?
A: Treat machine authentication as part of the identity programme, not as a network add-on.
Q: Why do security policies fail when they are not embedded in business processes?
A: Policies fail when they stay abstract and are not connected to access requests, approvals, remote access, and data handling workflows.
Q: What do teams get wrong about machine and server identities?
A: Teams often treat them as infrastructure details rather than governed identities with lifecycles, owners, and scoped permissions.
Practitioner guidance
- Map machine identities into the IAM inventory Treat certificates, server identities, device identities, and service access as governed identities with owners, expiry, and review cycles.
- Tie policy to workflow controls Check whether remote access, acceptable use, and data handling rules are actually enforced in approval, provisioning, and recertification workflows rather than only documented in policy libraries.
- Assign security ownership in each function Give business units named security advocates who can surface exceptions, challenge access scope, and participate in regular reviews of high-risk access paths.
What's in the full article
GlobalSign's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- A step-by-step explanation of how the article frames organisation-wide security ownership across departments and business units.
- Practical discussion of machine, server, and device authentication in corporate access control.
- Examples of policy areas the article recommends documenting, including remote access, password creation, and acceptable use.
- The source article's discussion of using security advocates inside functions and business groups to help operationalise policy.
👉 Read GlobalSign's article on cybersecurity priorities for stronger access governance →
Cybersecurity priorities for IAM teams: are your controls keeping up?
Explore further
11/07/2026 8:57 pm
Security governance breaks when access control is treated as a policy document instead of an identity discipline. The article correctly points to organisation-wide security ownership, but the deeper issue is that access decisions are made continuously across people, machines, and third parties. That means IAM, PAM, and machine identity governance have to be managed as one operating model, not separate tasks. Practitioners should measure whether policy is enforced at the point of access, not just approved on paper.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, with 46% confirmed and 26% suspected, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- Enterprises that have experienced a compromised NHI averaged 2.7 separate incidents in the past 12 months, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do security advocates improve access governance in practice?
A: Security advocates improve governance when they act as local control points for exceptions, policy interpretation, and review escalation. They help central security teams see how access is actually used in each function. That makes it easier to catch privilege creep, third-party drift, and inconsistent process adoption before they become systemic.
👉 Read our full editorial: Cybersecurity priorities for tighter access control and policy governance
