ITGC access management audits: is your identity governance ready?

TL;DR: ITGC audit checklists help organisations test access controls, evidence collection, interviews, inspections, and reporting before control gaps become compliance failures, according to Zluri. The deeper issue is that manual access governance breaks down when orphaned accounts, over-permissioned roles, and weak review cadence go unchallenged.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Access Management ITGC Audit Checklist: Simplify Your Internal Audit Process

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.
• 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.

Questions worth separating out

Q: What breaks when access reviews rely on stale entitlement data?

A: Access reviews become a documentation exercise instead of a control test when entitlement data is stale.

Q: Why do service accounts and privileged user accounts need the same governance discipline?

A: Both account types can reach critical systems and both can outlive the purpose they were created for.

Q: What do security teams get wrong about automated access reviews?

A: They often treat automation as a faster version of the same manual process.

Practitioner guidance

• Reconcile every privileged account to a named owner Require a business owner, system owner, and removal trigger for every privileged human and non-human account before the audit window opens.
• Replace spreadsheet-led reviews with a live entitlement source Pull access review inputs from the system of record, then validate that inactive accounts, orphaned accounts, and exceptions are visible in one place.
• Separate standing access from time-bound exceptions Track permanent entitlements separately from temporary approvals so reviewers can see which permissions were intended to persist and which were not.

What's in the full article

Zluri's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• Step-by-step access review workflow examples for ITGC audits across SaaS and cloud systems
• Automated reporting and evidence collection details for audit readiness and compliance submission
• Practical guidance on continuous monitoring, exception handling, and role-based access review automation
• Example audit outputs that show how remediation tracking can be presented to management

👉 Read Zluri's ITGC access management audit checklist and automation guidance →

ITGC access management audits: is your identity governance ready?

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