Excessive permissions in cloud access: where IAM teams lose control

TL;DR: Excessive permissions let users, applications, and systems retain more access than their roles require, expanding breach, insider threat, and compliance risk when role design, defaults, and review processes fail, according to Zluri. The core problem is not access volume alone but the absence of reliable entitlement governance across human and non-human accounts.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Access Management What Are Excessive Permissions?

By the numbers:

• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
• 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 excessive permissions in cloud environments?

A: Start by inventorying roles, accounts, and tokens, then compare granted access to actual task requirements.

Q: Why do service accounts with excessive permissions create so much risk?

A: Service accounts often bypass human-style controls, so broad access can persist unnoticed for long periods.

Q: What breaks when organisations rely on manual permission granting?

A: Manual granting tends to create inconsistent roles, forgotten exceptions, and access that outlives the job or project it was meant to support.

Practitioner guidance

• Tighten role definitions before expanding cloud access Map each role to the minimum entitlements it actually needs, then remove inherited admin rights and broad default permissions that were added for convenience.
• Certify standing access on a recurring schedule Run access reviews for both human and non-human identities, with a separate approval path for emergency access so temporary elevation does not become permanent.
• Revoke third-party access at offboarding Tie vendor access to contract end dates, project closure, and owner sign-off so external identities do not retain permissions after the relationship changes.

What's in the full article

Zluri's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• Examples of where excessive permissions appear in vendor-managed SaaS access models and third-party support scenarios.
• The article's own explanation of RBAC, JIT, and periodic access reviews as controls for permission reduction.
• Operational examples of deprovisioning workflows that remove access when employees change roles or leave.
• The vendor's framing of access management tooling for teams that need implementation detail after the governance discussion.

👉 Read Zluri's article on excessive permissions and access management →

Excessive permissions in cloud access: where IAM teams lose control?

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