Topic starter
02/06/2026 12:58 pm
TL;DR: Federal zero trust efforts are stalling because agencies cannot continuously govern privileged identities, legacy systems resist modern controls, and NHIs are multiplying faster than inventories and rotation processes can keep up, according to Delinea. The operational gap, not the policy gap, now determines whether zero trust becomes real.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Delinea: “Federal zero trust: Turn stalled strategy into execution”.
By the numbers:
- The article says NHIs outnumber human identities by at least 10 to 1 in most federal environments.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when zero trust is applied to federal environments without NHI governance?
A: The model breaks at execution time.
Q: Why do legacy systems make zero trust harder to enforce in government networks?
A: Legacy systems often assume persistent credentials, local admin access, and continuous trust inside a perimeter.
Q: How do you know if privileged access governance is actually working?
A: It is working when standing privilege falls, emergency elevation is rare, and reviews can clearly show why each high-risk entitlement exists.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory every privileged identity Include human admins, service accounts, application credentials, machine-to-machine tokens, scheduled task accounts, and database connection strings.
- Classify legacy systems by control compatibility Separate platforms that can support conditional access, short-lived privilege, and external policy evaluation from those that still depend on persistent credentials or local admin access.
- Remove standing privilege from routine operations Shift routine privileged actions to just-in-time access with explicit scoping and expiry.
Bottom line: Federal zero trust stalls when identity governance cannot keep pace with how privileged access is actually used in federal operations.
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02/06/2026 12:59 pm
Execution failure, not policy failure, is the defining zero trust problem in federal environments. Federal agencies already have the language of zero trust. What they often lack is continuous identity governance that can enforce that language across privileged users, NHIs, and legacy systems. The important shift is to stop treating zero trust as a design exercise and recognise it as an operating discipline. For practitioners, the programme question is whether identity controls can be executed repeatedly under mission conditions, not whether the architecture is approved.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 90% of IT leaders say properly managing NHIs is essential for a successful zero-trust implementation, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should federal teams do when zero trust controls slow mission operations?
A: They should redesign the access workflow rather than accept workarounds. If authentication, approval, or elevation steps add friction that operators bypass, the programme will drift back toward persistent access and informal exceptions. The right response is to preserve mission speed with scoped, reviewable access paths that can be executed repeatedly under operational pressure.
👉 Read our full editorial: Federal zero trust execution is stalling on NHI governance gaps