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25/06/2026 3:15 pm
TL;DR: Private equity firms face rising exposure from fraud, cyber risk, third-party access, and compliance failures, while automated internal controls and access governance are needed to keep reporting reliable and privilege contained, according to SafePaaS. The core issue is not just control volume but whether access review, segregation of duties, and third-party oversight still work as portfolios expand.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SafePaaS: private equity risk management and access governance
By the numbers:
- According to Gartner, organizations will spend $188.3 billion on information security and risk management products and services in 2023.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should private equity firms govern privileged access across portfolio companies?
A: They should treat the portfolio as a single access-governance surface, even when legal entities differ.
Q: Why do third-party vendors create disproportionate risk in private equity environments?
A: Because vendors often need elevated access to finance, operations, and infrastructure systems, yet firms still remain accountable for what those vendors do.
Q: What breaks when segregation of duties is managed manually in PE firms?
A: Manual SoD review breaks when the number of entities, users, and systems grows faster than the control team can reconcile them.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory access across the portfolio Build a consolidated view of privileged users, service accounts, and third-party access across fund entities and portfolio companies before integrating reporting or shared services.
- Automate segregation of duties checks Replace spreadsheet-based review with rules-driven SoD controls that flag conflicting entitlements in finance, ERP, and close processes.
- Restrict vendor access to recorded sessions Move third parties off broad VPN-style access and into monitored sessions with approval, logging, and periodic entitlement recertification.
What's in the full article
SafePaaS's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- A breakdown of the six private equity risk categories and how they interact across finance, cyber, compliance, and third-party operations.
- Examples of automated internal controls and access governance practices used to reduce manual review and evidence collection.
- Discussion of why provisioning and de-provisioning become the biggest roadblocks once vendor and portfolio access scale.
- Context on how PE firms can tighten oversight without losing operational flexibility across investment entities.
👉 Read SafePaaS's analysis of private equity risk controls and access governance →
Private equity cyber and control risk: what IAM teams should fix?
Explore further
25/06/2026 4:40 pm
Private equity risk management fails when ownership changes faster than access governance. The article is really about the control gap created when firms acquire systems before they have enough visibility into who can do what inside them. That is not a cyber-only issue or a finance-only issue. It is a governance design problem that cuts across IAM, PAM, third-party access, and reporting integrity, which means the control model has to follow the portfolio structure, not the org chart.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Two-thirds of enterprises have endured a successful cyberattack resulting from compromised non-human identities, with a quarter encountering multiple attacks, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- Enterprises that have experienced a compromised NHI averaged 2.7 separate incidents in the past 12 months, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when a portfolio company fails a compliance obligation?
A: In private equity structures, accountability can extend beyond the operating company when the firm exercises control, such as board influence or ownership-driven oversight. That is why firms need traceable access governance, evidence retention, and control ownership that clearly spans the investment structure. Responsibility does not disappear just because operations are delegated.
👉 Read our full editorial: Private equity risk control depends on stronger access governance
