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25/06/2026 12:28 am
TL;DR: Modern access management maturity serves as a practical mirror for security, platform, and DevSecOps teams evaluating human, NHI, and agent access across multi-cloud and on-prem environments, according to P0 Security. The deeper issue is not whether controls exist, but whether the programme can describe its current state honestly enough to close fragmented governance gaps.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by P0 Security: Self Assessment: Modern Access Management Maturity by Kelsey Brazill
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams use an IAM maturity assessment in practice?
A: They should use it to find where identity governance is fragmented, not to produce a vanity score.
Q: What breaks when NHI access lifecycle ownership is unclear?
A: Access tends to persist beyond its intended use because no one is accountable for revocation, rotation, or certification.
Q: When should organisations prioritise access visibility over adding more controls?
A: When multiple tools are touching the same identities but no team can explain which one is authoritative.
Practitioner guidance
- Map the current access lifecycle by identity type Separate human accounts, service accounts, API keys, certificates, and agent identities into distinct lifecycle paths so you can see where ownership, review, and offboarding are missing.
- Identify overlapping access controls List where secrets management, PAM, cloud IAM, and platform tooling all touch the same entitlement so you can remove duplicate approvals and conflicting policy sources.
- Assign named lifecycle owners Require one accountable owner for provisioning, rotation, certification, and decommissioning for each identity class, including NHIs that are created outside central IAM.
What's in the full article
P0 Security's full post covers the operational detail this analysis intentionally leaves for the source:
- The actual maturity checklist used to assess where teams sit on the Modern IAM Maturity Curve
- The specific prompts security, platform, and DevSecOps teams can use to identify fragmented or redundant controls
- The practical guidance behind the self-assessment mirror metaphor and how to use it in internal discussion
- The linked CISO's Field Guide to Unified Cloud Access for teams that want implementation detail
👉 Read P0 Security's self assessment on modern access management maturity →
Modern access management maturity: what does your IAM programme miss?
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25/06/2026 9:23 am
Modern access management maturity is a governance diagnostic, not a marketing score. The article’s strongest contribution is its insistence that teams should measure where they really are, not where they want to be. That is the right frame for identity programmes spanning humans, NHIs, and agents, because a maturity claim without operational evidence quickly becomes theatre. Practitioners should treat maturity assessment as a way to expose governance drift and control overlap before they attempt remediation.
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.
- 38% have no or low visibility into those OAuth-connected vendors, and another 47% report only partial visibility, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can teams tell whether maturity has improved?
A: Maturity has improved when the programme can show a smaller set of authoritative controls, clearer ownership, and evidence that identities are being reviewed and removed on time. If teams still rely on manual reconciliation or cannot explain where access decisions come from, the programme has not become more mature, only more complex.
👉 Read our full editorial: Modern access management maturity is a mirror, not a scorecard
