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25/06/2026 3:14 pm
TL;DR: Privileged access reviews are positioned as a control for reducing standing admin risk, closing audit gaps, and catching privilege creep across AD, cloud, and SaaS, according to SecurEnds. The real issue is not review cadence alone but whether access remains visible, attributable, and removable before it becomes routine exposure.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SecurEnds: Privileged Access Reviews Made Simple with SecurEnds
By the numbers:
- 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys.
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when privileged access reviews are done manually across cloud and SaaS systems?
A: Manual reviews break when the organisation cannot reliably inventory all privileged accounts, route them to the right reviewers, and prove that removals happened.
Q: Why do standing admin rights increase risk even when access reviews exist?
A: Standing admin rights create a continuous exposure window between review cycles.
Q: How can security teams tell whether privileged access reviews are actually working?
A: They are working when every privileged entitlement is inventoried, every decision is traceable, and revoked access is removed from all connected systems without delay.
Practitioner guidance
- Rebuild the privileged inventory first Aggregate administrative accounts from AD, cloud, SaaS, databases, and local systems into one governed register before launching a certification campaign.
- Separate standing privilege from temporary need Convert persistent elevated rights into time-bound access wherever the role does not require daily administrative control, and reserve exceptions for documented cases only.
- Tie reviews to offboarding triggers Trigger privileged access reviews when a contractor ends, a role changes, or a merger creates duplicate administrative paths, so access does not outlive the business need.
What's in the full article
SecurEnds's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Campaign setup steps for privileged access reviews across AD, cloud, and SaaS systems.
- Reviewer workflow examples for managers, app owners, and security teams.
- Auto-remediation and escalation handling when access should be revoked rather than certified.
- Exportable audit reporting detail for compliance evidence and internal review records.
👉 Read SecurEnds's guide to privileged access reviews and automation →
Privileged access reviews: are your admin rights still justified?
Explore further
25/06/2026 4:38 pm
Privileged access review is an identity governance control, not an administrative cleanup task. The article treats review as a way to shrink risk, but the deeper point is that certification only works when entitlement scope, ownership, and offboarding are already disciplined. Without that governance baseline, review becomes documentation of drift rather than a control over drift. Practitioners should treat the review process as an enforcement mechanism for identity lifecycle hygiene.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, increasing the risk of compromise over time, according to NHI Mgmt Group research.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should be accountable when privileged access is left in place after role changes or offboarding?
A: Accountability should sit with the system owner, the reviewer, and the identity governance function together, because privileged access is a lifecycle issue, not a single-team problem. Where access spans human users and non-human identities, the governance owner must ensure that offboarding, recertification, and remediation are linked end to end.
👉 Read our full editorial: Privileged access reviews expose the cost of standing admin rights
