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11/07/2026 8:29 pm
TL;DR: Identity management now has to unify authentication, access administration, governance and privileged controls to reduce cybersecurity risk without disrupting operations, particularly where identities, assets and regulatory obligations intersect, according to Soffid. The practical issue is less product choice than whether IAM, IGA, SSO, MFA and PAM are actually operating as one governed control plane.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Soffid: Identity Management Solutions for the major challenges of enterprise cybersecurity
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.
- 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after the targeted organisation is notified, showing a critical gap in remediation procedures.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams unify IAM, IGA and PAM without creating more operational friction?
A: Start by using one authoritative identity inventory, one approval model and one audit trail across the major account classes.
Q: Why do separate access tools create governance blind spots?
A: Because the control owner cannot see how authentication, approvals, elevation and revocation interact when they live in different systems.
Q: What breaks when privileged access is handled like standard access?
A: Privilege often expands beyond the original business need, and reviewers miss it because the account looks routine.
Practitioner guidance
- Consolidate identity governance into one control plane Align SSO, MFA, access reviews, lifecycle events and logging so user and machine identities are governed through the same decision and evidence model.
- Separate privileged accounts from standard access paths Place administrator, executive and elevated machine accounts into distinct approval, monitoring and session-control processes rather than reusing ordinary access workflows.
- Tie access removal to lifecycle events Trigger revocation, recertification and entitlement cleanup when employees move roles, vendors change, or non-human accounts are retired.
What's in the full article
Soffid's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How the vendor positions IAM unification across access, governance and monitoring in one platform
- How Soffid describes its SSO, MFA, IGA and PAM modules in day-to-day identity operations
- How the article frames compliance, audit simplification and real-time monitoring as part of the same identity model
- How the source connects identity management to different industry deployment scenarios
👉 Read Soffid's analysis of unified IAM, governance and privileged access →
Identity unification and IAM governance: what teams need to reassess?
Explore further
11/07/2026 8:59 pm
Unified identity governance is now the baseline, not the optimisation. The article is pointing at a real operational truth: authentication, access administration, PAM and audit cannot be managed as separate islands without creating control gaps. That is especially true when the same organisation must govern employees, administrators, service accounts and third parties. Practitioners should treat identity unification as the minimum viable governance model.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, increasing the risk of compromise over time.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own lifecycle decisions for service accounts and privileged users?
A: The identity governance function should own policy, while application, infrastructure and security teams provide the operational context. Ownership must be explicit, because unattended service accounts and privileged users quickly become residual risk if no one is accountable for their review and removal.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity management must unify access, governance and privileged control
