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02/06/2026 6:54 pm
TL;DR: Enterprises with formal IGA processes still struggle with joiner delays, mover risk, leaver sprawl, and AI-related service identities that lack clear ownership, according to SafePaaS. The governance problem is no longer workflow volume alone, but whether policy, accountability, and evidence remain structurally separated.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SafePaaS: federated identity access governance and how it works in practice
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern NHI access across joiners, movers, and leavers?
A: Security teams should treat joiners, movers, and leavers as continuous governance events, not periodic admin tasks.
Q: Why do non-human identities make access governance harder than human IAM?
A: Non-human identities make governance harder because they scale faster than human accounts, often have unclear owners, and can hold privileges no one reviews closely.
Q: What breaks when access approvals stay in ticket queues too long?
A: When approvals stay in ticket queues too long, teams create shadow processes, delayed go-lives, and ad hoc workarounds that bypass policy.
Practitioner guidance
- Map all NHI ownership to accountable business roles Inventory service accounts, bots, API identities, and AI-related accounts, then require a named business owner and technical custodian for each one.
- Separate approval, enforcement, and evidence functions Use an independent governance layer to evaluate access, route decisions, and record evidence outside the target application.
- Continuously reconcile role changes and lingering access Trigger access evaluation whenever a user changes role, a project ends, or an integration is retired.
With 19.6% of security professionals expressing strong confidence in their organisation's ability to securely manage non-human workload identities, per the 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report, many programmes are still under-calibrated for the scale of the problem?
👉 Read SafePaaS's analysis of federated identity access governance and NHI risk →
Explore further
02/06/2026 7:08 pm
Federated governance is becoming the practical answer to NHI sprawl. The article makes a useful point for the field: identity governance fails when it is reduced to workflow throughput. As non-human identities increase, central teams need a control layer that can enforce policy consistently while leaving decision ownership with the business. Practitioners should treat this as an operating model shift, not a tooling preference.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 70% of organisations grant AI systems more access than they would give a human employee performing the exact same job, according to the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
- Only 44% of organisations have implemented any policies to manage their AI agents, despite 92% agreeing that governing AI agents is critical to enterprise security.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do organisations know whether federated governance is actually working?
A: Organisations know federated governance is working when access decisions are made by accountable owners, policy exceptions are tracked centrally, and evidence is generated automatically from the control layer. If auditors still need screenshots, spreadsheets, or manual explanations, the governance model is not yet providing reliable control.
👉 Read our full editorial: Federated identity access governance is shifting NHI control models
