Notifications
Clear all
Topic starter
15/08/2026 6:08 pm
TL;DR: Standing privilege keeps reappearing because traditional PAM was built for stable admin access, not cloud, SaaS, pipelines, or agentic AI identities, according to Britive. The architectural shift is toward ephemeral privilege, where access is created only for the task and removed when work ends, so the real control surface becomes runtime authorisation rather than credential rotation.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Britive: Why Standing Privilege Keeps Coming Back (and What Ephemeral Privilege Changes)
By the numbers:
- 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, increasing the risk of compromise over time.
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce standing privilege in cloud environments?
A: Start by identifying which cloud roles, service accounts, and automation identities have persistent access they do not need every minute of the day.
Q: Why do service accounts and pipelines make standing privilege harder to eliminate?
A: Because automated workflows recreate access faster than manual review can remove it.
Q: What do teams get wrong about credential rotation in cloud IAM?
A: They often treat rotation as the main fix, when the larger issue is that the entitlement remains standing.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory where privilege is recreated automatically Trace standing access back to infrastructure as code, pipeline templates, role bindings, and inherited group membership.
- Separate entitlement review from runtime authorisation Keep IGA focused on who may be entitled, but move the access decision to the moment of use.
- Bound service account and pipeline access to task duration Replace reusable long-lived credentials with short-lived, task-scoped access for automated workflows.
What's in the full article
Britive's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Runtime decision flow for creating and removing task-scoped access across cloud, SaaS, pipelines, and agentic AI runtimes
- Practical distinctions between ephemeral privilege, JIT access, and traditional vault-based PAM in real operating environments
- Examples of how audit evidence is captured per request instead of reconstructed after the fact
- Implementation details for handling service accounts, federated sessions, assumed roles, and delegated permissions
👉 Read Britive's analysis of standing privilege and ephemeral privilege →
Ephemeral privilege and standing access: what IAM teams should change?
Explore further
15/08/2026 6:16 pm
Standing privilege is an architectural failure, not a hygiene failure. Cleanup projects keep regressing because the underlying entitlement model still treats access as something that should exist by default. When the platform, pipeline, or role definition recreates privilege on every deployment, manual revocation cannot hold. Practitioner implication: identity teams must stop measuring success by cleanup effort and start measuring whether the entitlement source has been removed.
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 the 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 do organisations decide whether ephemeral privilege is worth adopting?
A: Use it where repeated access, distributed systems, and automation make standing permissions the real risk. The strongest fit is cloud, SaaS, pipelines, and AI runtimes, where short-lived task authority reduces blast radius and audit burden without depending on long-term credential reuse.
👉 Read our full editorial: Ephemeral privilege changes the standing access problem in cloud IAM
