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10/06/2026 11:33 pm
TL;DR: Identity drift, not just active exploitation, is increasingly the breach multiplier as unused SaaS accounts, orphaned third-party access, privilege creep and forgotten automation expand attack paths, according to Gathid. The governance lesson is simple: if access is not continuously validated, reviewed and owned, it becomes inherited risk rather than controlled privilege.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Gathid: Identity drift is becoming the real enterprise breach multiplier
By the numbers:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, 46% confirmed and 26% suspected.
- When AWS credentials are exposed publicly, attackers attempt access within an average of 17 minutes and as quickly as 9 minutes in some cases.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce identity drift in SaaS and NHI environments?
A: Start by reconciling approved access against current entitlements and ownership.
Q: Why does identity drift increase breach risk so quickly?
A: Because attackers often do not need to create new access when old access still exists.
Q: How do organisations know whether access governance is actually working?
A: Measure whether every identity has a current owner, a justified business purpose and a review trail that matches actual use.
Practitioner guidance
- Map inherited access first Build a baseline of accounts, tokens, roles and third-party integrations that exist because of prior approvals, copied templates or temporary exceptions.
- Tie every identity to a named business owner Require an accountable owner for human, service and integration identities, then make ownership part of the review record.
- Move from periodic review to continuous entitlement reconciliation Compare current entitlements against approved state on a daily basis for privileged users, service accounts and external integrations.
What's in the full article
Gathid's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The article expands on the digital twin approach for modelling identity relationships and blast radius before access changes.
- It includes practical steps for building a normalised identity view from directory, IAM, HR, cloud and SaaS data sources.
- The source also discusses automated policy testing in CI/CD pipelines for roles, APIs and agent integrations.
- It outlines how to measure trust decay, or how quickly privilege diverges from intent, in day-to-day operations.
👉 Read Gathid's analysis of identity drift and enterprise breach exposure →
Identity drift in SaaS and NHI access: what teams are missing?
Explore further
12/06/2026 5:47 am
Identity drift is a governance failure, not just an inventory problem. The article shows that the enterprise risk comes from access that persists after the reason for access has expired. That is a lifecycle failure: ownership, expiry and review no longer line up with business reality. Practitioners should treat drift as a control gap in entitlement governance, not as a cosmetic visibility issue.
A few things that frame the scale:
- The average organisation believes more than 1 in 5 of their non-human identities are insufficiently secured, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, with 46% confirmed and 26% suspected.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should teams do when access is inherited from older projects or integrations?
A: Treat inherited access as a remediation queue, not a permanent entitlement class. Revalidate the business need, confirm ownership, and remove anything that cannot be justified. Where removal might disrupt services, simulate the dependency first so you can retire access without guessing.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity drift is becoming the real enterprise breach multiplier
