Topic starter
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.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by SecurEnds: “How to Perform Privileged Access Reviews with SecurEnds”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when standing admin rights are left in place?
A: Standing admin rights make containment slower because a stolen credential can immediately reach critical systems without a fresh approval step.
Q: Why do privileged access reviews often fail to satisfy auditors?
A: They fail when the review checks whether access exists but cannot prove how long it existed or whether it was removed everywhere it mattered.
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
- Map every privileged entitlement to an owner Create a complete inventory for admin accounts, cloud roles and application super-user access so every certification has a named decision-maker.
- Bind review decisions to actual revocation Ensure that a rejected entitlement is removed from the authoritative system, not just marked as denied in a workflow record.
- Shorten the review interval for standing admin rights Use shorter cycles for roles that can change infrastructure, data or security settings, especially where access spans multiple platforms.
Bottom line: Standing admin rights become a durable risk when certification does not lead to enforced revocation in the authoritative system.
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25/06/2026 4:38 pm
Standing admin rights are a lifecycle problem, not a point-in-time review problem: Privileged access reviews only work when entitlement age, ownership and current need are governed together. Otherwise the organisation keeps re-certifying access that has already outlived its original purpose. The control failure is persistence, not visibility alone. The practitioner takeaway is that admin rights must be treated as time-bounded governance objects, not permanent entitlements.
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.
- 91% of organisations say at least half of their privileged access is always-on, and only 1% have fully implemented just-in-time privileged access, according to a CyberArk study.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Should organisations treat cloud admin, SaaS admin and directory admin rights the same way?
A: No. They should apply the same governance intent but recognise that each platform has different ownership, revocation paths and evidence quality. A review process that treats them as interchangeable usually misses scope, hides exceptions and weakens enforcement across the estate.
👉 Read our full editorial: Privileged access reviews expose the cost of standing admin rights