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11/06/2026 10:56 pm
TL;DR: Identity and access management frameworks cover onboarding, access requests, reviews, and enforcement, but the article shows that modern IAM still depends on policy discipline, visibility, and lifecycle control to work well, according to Zluri. That makes the governance gap more operational than conceptual: standing access, weak audit discipline, and unmanaged non-human identities remain the pressure points.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Access Management Identity and Access Management Framework: An Overview
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.
- 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern non-human identities within an IAM framework?
A: Security teams should treat non-human identities as first-class identities, not as technical exceptions.
Q: Why do access reviews often fail to reduce privilege creep?
A: Access reviews fail when organisations do not have a complete and current picture of active identities and entitlements.
Q: What is the difference between RBAC and least privilege in practice?
A: RBAC assigns permissions through roles, while least privilege limits access to the minimum needed for the task.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory non-human identities alongside human users Build a single identity inventory that includes service accounts, API keys, certificates, and workload identities, then assign each one an owner and lifecycle state.
- Rework RBAC around current task scope Review roles for broad catch-all permissions, remove stale entitlements, and separate temporary elevated access from steady-state access where possible.
- Treat access reviews as evidence-based controls Require complete entitlement data, active ownership, and logging before certifying access reviews, otherwise the review is only documenting unknown risk.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full article covers the practical IAM framework details this post intentionally leaves at a higher level:
- Step-by-step explanations of IAM components such as SSO, MFA, RBAC, and auditing in a single operating model
- Examples of how onboarding, access requests, and periodic reviews are expected to work inside the framework
- Operational detail on using IAM controls to support compliance, monitoring, and access enforcement
- The article's product-oriented examples of how Zluri positions IAM for enterprise implementation
👉 Read Zluri's overview of identity and access management framework controls →
IAM frameworks and NHI controls: where governance still falls short?
Explore further
12/06/2026 7:22 am
IAM frameworks are still too often treated as access administration, when they should be treated as identity governance. The article’s sequence of authentication, authorization, monitoring, and compliance is structurally sound, but it stops short of the harder governance question: whether identities remain owned, reviewed, and revocable after provisioning. That gap matters most for non-human identities, where the lifecycle is faster and the blast radius is often larger. Practitioners should treat the framework as necessary, but insufficient without lifecycle enforcement.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which means most governance programmes are still operating with partial inventory data.
A question worth separating out:
Q: When should organisations prioritise lifecycle governance over new access features?
A: Organisations should prioritise lifecycle governance whenever identities are being created faster than they are being retired, reviewed, or reassigned. That is especially true for service accounts, automation credentials, and contractor access. New access features add convenience, but lifecycle governance is what determines whether access can actually be removed when it is no longer needed.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity and access management frameworks still miss NHI control gaps
