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24/06/2026 5:43 pm
TL;DR: IAM remains central to enterprise audits because it governs user, vendor, and machine access, supports evidence collection, and helps enforce least privilege across cloud environments, according to Unosecur. The practical issue is not audit paperwork but whether identity controls are visible, reviewable, and tight enough to withstand scrutiny.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Unosecur: How can Unosecur help with preparing enterprises for Audits
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams prepare identity evidence for SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audits?
A: They should centralise identity telemetry, map entitlements to actual activity, and keep a clean inventory of human, vendor, and machine identities.
Q: Why do machine identities complicate audit readiness?
A: Machine identities complicate audit readiness because they often sit outside the manual review process that governs human accounts.
Q: What breaks when access reviews are based only on granted permissions?
A: Reviews based only on granted permissions miss whether access was actually used, whether it was excessive, and whether it still matches the job or workload.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory human, vendor, and machine identities together Build one audit inventory that includes employees, contractors, service accounts, and cloud identities.
- Tie access reviews to real activity Use executed actions, not only granted entitlements, to judge whether access is still justified.
- Apply time-bound access for third parties Use just-in-time access for vendors and freelancers wherever permanent access would create avoidable audit exposure.
What's in the full article
Unosecur's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How the platform frames identity permissions by user activity for audit preparation
- Examples of JIT and JEP controls for vendors, freelancers, and machine identities
- The specific dashboard questions it says auditors ask about users, machine identities, and regions
- Its account-level querying approach for reviewing actions, used services, and privilege risk
👉 Read Unosecur's article on IAM audit readiness and identity governance →
IAM audit readiness: is your identity governance actually complete?
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25/06/2026 3:40 am
Audit readiness is really an identity governance test, not a documentation exercise. ISO and SOC reviews expose whether an organisation can prove control over access, privilege, and accountability across its identity estate. If identity records are incomplete, the audit problem is already a governance problem. Practitioners should treat audit evidence as a byproduct of continuous identity control, not as a last-minute packaging task.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, increasing the risk of compromise over time, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when third-party access remains active after the task is complete?
A: Accountability sits with the governance owner who approved the access and the team responsible for offboarding it. If third-party access is not time-bound, the organisation inherits open-ended audit and security exposure. Frameworks such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 expect access control to be actively governed, not assumed.
👉 Read our full editorial: IAM audit readiness depends on identity visibility and control
