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10/07/2026 9:24 pm
TL;DR: Privileged accounts remain a high-value breach target, with Soffid citing Verizon data that roughly 40% of breaches are linked to them, while third-party access and privilege creep continue to create governance gaps across cloud, hybrid, and legacy environments. The real shift is from protecting accounts to governing privileged identity lifecycles, access scope, and review discipline.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Soffid: Best Practices in PAM, from Privileged Account Management to Privileged Identity Governance
By the numbers:
- approximately 40% of data breaches are linked to privileged accounts
- 61% of companies have experienced issues related to third-party access
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern privileged access across human users and third parties?
A: They should treat privileged access as a lifecycle problem, not only a credential problem.
Q: Why do standing privileged accounts remain such a high-risk control gap?
A: Standing privilege keeps the attack window open between tasks, which means an attacker only needs one compromise or abuse event to reach administrative reach.
Q: What do organisations get wrong about third-party privileged access?
A: They often assume temporary access stays temporary without enforcing expiry, review, and offboarding.
Practitioner guidance
- Map privileged identity lifecycles end to end Inventory every privileged identity, including administrators, third-party accounts, and delegated service access.
- Convert standing privilege into task-scoped elevation Replace persistent admin rights with just-in-time elevation for specific work windows.
- Bind third-party access to contract and offboarding events Require suppliers, auditors, and consultants to use named, time-bounded privileged access that is reviewed on a fixed cadence and revoked when the relationship changes or the engagement ends.
What's in the full article
Soffid's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How Soffid frames PAM, IGA, and identity threat detection as one governance stack for privileged access
- The article's practical explanation of just-in-time elevation and continuous re-validation in day-to-day operations
- How the vendor describes monitoring, logging, and MFA in the context of privileged sessions
- The compatibility angle for legacy and hybrid environments that implementation teams often need before rollout
👉 Read Soffid's article on PAM best practices and privileged identity governance →
Privileged access governance: are your controls keeping up?
Explore further
10/07/2026 9:46 pm
Privileged identity governance is the more accurate control model for modern PAM. The article correctly moves beyond account protection toward lifecycle control, session oversight, and entitlement review. That shift matters because the security problem is not just privileged credentials, but privileged identity state across time, scope, and delegation. Practitioners should stop treating PAM as a vault-only discipline and start treating it as governed identity infrastructure.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- Two-thirds of enterprises have endured a successful cyberattack resulting from compromised non-human identities, with a quarter encountering multiple attacks.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can teams tell whether privileged access governance is actually working?
A: Look for three signals: fewer standing privileges, faster revocation after task completion, and evidence that session monitoring is connected to access review outcomes. If reviews exist but privileges remain unchanged, governance is only partial. Effective programmes show that access, usage, and offboarding are all bound together.
👉 Read our full editorial: Privileged identity governance is overtaking traditional PAM models
