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10/06/2026 9:49 pm
TL;DR: Service accounts are rising across SaaS environments, but Zluri’s guide says many teams still lack full visibility, centralized ownership, least-privilege enforcement, and timely access reviews, leaving privileged non-human accounts exposed to misuse and lateral movement. The governance problem is structural: access can outlive accountability unless lifecycle controls are explicit.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Security & Compliance How To Effectively Govern Service Accounts? Guide For 2026
By the numbers:
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when service accounts do not have clear ownership?
A: When service accounts lack clear ownership, no one can reliably approve, review, or retire them.
Q: Why do service accounts with standing privilege increase risk?
A: Standing privilege increases risk because the account remains ready for use even when the original operational need has passed.
Q: How do security teams know if service account access reviews are working?
A: Access reviews are working only if they lead to measurable entitlement changes, not just completed certifications.
Practitioner guidance
- Build a complete service account inventory Map service accounts across apps, directories, developer tools, and integrations, then assign a named owner and business purpose to each one.
- Reduce permanent privilege on automation identities Review every service account for permissions that exceed the workload’s actual function.
- Tie access review to revocation and termination Use certification outcomes to trigger removal, modification, or termination of service accounts that are inactive, unowned, or no longer tied to a current application.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full guide covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step discovery methods for locating service accounts across IDPs, directories, apps, and finance systems.
- A worked walkthrough of certification creation, reviewer assignment, fallback owners, and post-review playbooks.
- Examples of auto-remediation actions for rejected or modified service account access.
- Audit trail and reporting outputs that support evidence collection for governance reviews.
👉 Read Zluri's guide on governing service accounts for 2026 →
Service account governance gaps teams are still missing?
Explore further
12/06/2026 6:43 am
Service account governance fails when ownership is treated as optional. The article correctly points to the lack of a central system of record, but the deeper issue is accountability collapse: a service account without a named owner is already outside effective governance. That breaks lifecycle management before any technical exploit occurs. Practitioners should treat ownership as the first control, not a metadata field.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should be accountable for service account offboarding?
A: Accountability should sit with the application owner or system owner who can validate whether the service account is still needed. Security and IAM teams should define the process, but they cannot own the business purpose. Offboarding works when ownership, application retirement, and deprovisioning are linked in the same workflow.
👉 Read our full editorial: Service account governance is still failing on visibility and review
