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12/06/2026 9:14 pm
TL;DR: Privileged access management still fails if privileged accounts are not discovered, classified, vaulted, rotated, and reviewed across human, machine, service, cloud, and application identities, according to JumpCloud. The governance gap is no longer just excess privilege; it is the inability to manage privileged access as a lifecycle discipline across every actor type.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by JumpCloud: Privileged access management best practices
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern privileged access across human and non-human identities?
A: Treat privileged access as a shared governance problem across admins, service accounts, cloud roles, and application identities.
Q: Why do standing privileged accounts increase breach risk?
A: Standing privilege gives an attacker a reusable path once an account is compromised.
Q: What do teams get wrong about just-in-time access in PAM?
A: Teams often assume JIT is a replacement for governance rather than a way to enforce it.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory every privileged identity Include human admins, service accounts, cloud roles, application credentials, API keys, and any other identity that can change critical systems.
- Remove standing elevation wherever possible Convert persistent admin grants into task-scoped elevation with explicit expiry, approval, and automatic revocation.
- Vault and rotate privileged secrets on a defined cadence Store passwords, API keys, and SSH keys in managed vaults, then rotate them after use or on a schedule that reflects account criticality.
What's in the full article
JumpCloud's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step PAM rollout sequence from discovery through continuous improvement
- Operational examples for vaulting, rotation, and session isolation in mixed environments
- Training topics for administrators and privileged users, including phishing and social engineering response
- Integrated workflow ideas for IdP, SIEM, SOAR, and ITSM connections
👉 Read JumpCloud's guide to privileged access management best practices →
Privileged access management for NHIs: are your controls keeping up?
Explore further
12/06/2026 11:10 pm
PAM is now an identity lifecycle problem, not a vaulting problem. This guide is right to include discovery, classification, rotation, JIT, review, and incident response in one model. The old assumption was that privileged access was a limited admin function that could be wrapped in a vault. That assumption fails when privilege is distributed across service accounts, application identities, cloud roles, and human admins. Practitioners should treat privileged access as a lifecycle across every actor type, not a single control.
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.
- Enterprises that have experienced a compromised NHI averaged 2.7 separate incidents in the past 12 months, which shows how repeated exposure compounds governance failure.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when a privileged account is misused?
A: Accountability sits with the identity owner, the system owner, and the governance function that approved the privilege in the first place. For non-human identities, that means the business process and technical owner must both be explicit. If no owner can explain why the access exists, the programme has a governance gap, not just a control gap.
👉 Read our full editorial: Privileged access management is shifting toward NHI control
