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17/08/2026 4:38 pm
TL;DR: Compliance is now a board-level identity security problem because fragmented controls, static entitlements, and manual evidence collection leave organisations exposed across human and non-human identities, according to Saviynt. The practical shift is from reactive IAM to continuous assurance, where policy enforcement, lifecycle governance, and audit readiness are treated as one control system.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Saviynt: 5 Ways to Solve Compliance Challenges with Saviynt’s Identity Security Platform
By the numbers:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, with 46% confirmed and 26% suspected.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern non-human identities for compliance?
A: Start with ownership, inventory, and lifecycle control.
Q: Why do standing privileges create more risk in hybrid environments?
A: Standing privileges persist across sessions, platforms, and operational handoffs, which expands the window for misuse.
Q: How can organisations tell whether identity assurance is actually working?
A: Look for consistency across onboarding, recovery, and re-verification events.
Practitioner guidance
- Map identity controls to a single evidence model Inventory where access approvals, certification records, and revocation evidence live today, then define one source of truth for audit-ready reporting across cloud and on-prem systems.
- Reduce standing privilege in regulated access paths Prioritise administrative and business-critical accounts that retain access after the task ends, then move them to time-bound access where the workflow can support it.
- Separate human and non-human lifecycle gaps Run one review for joiner-mover-leaver processes across employees, service accounts, bots, and APIs so hidden ownership and offboarding gaps are exposed before the next certification cycle.
What's in the full article
Saviynt's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Pre-built compliance control templates mapped to SOX, PCI DSS, GDPR, FedRAMP, and related frameworks.
- Centralised audit dashboard workflows for evidence collection and compliance reporting.
- Role recommendation, peer access review, and risk scoring features used to support certification decisions.
- Cross-environment policy enforcement details across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS applications.
👉 Read Saviynt's blog on compliance challenges and identity security →
Identity compliance and continuous assurance: are controls keeping up?
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17/08/2026 4:44 pm
Continuous assurance is replacing periodic compliance because identity risk now changes faster than audit cycles. Manual reviews and retrospective evidence collection assume access states are stable long enough to be sampled. That assumption no longer holds in cloud and multi-application environments where entitlements, tokens, and service accounts change continuously. Practitioners should treat compliance as an always-on control function, not a quarterly reporting task.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- Only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in their ability to secure NHIs, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when compliance failures involve both IAM and NHI governance?
A: Accountability should sit with the identity governance owner, but operational ownership must be explicit for human access, non-human credentials, and privileged workflows. If those responsibilities are split across teams without a shared control model, gaps appear at the boundaries and auditors will treat them as governance failures.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity compliance is shifting from IAM to continuous assurance
