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25/06/2026 2:53 pm
TL;DR: Manual user access reviews often become a compliance exercise rather than a control, even though annual certification is required across SOX, PCI-DSS, HIPAA and many audits, according to SafePaaS. Automating reviews matters because entitlement drift, excessive privilege and delayed remediation create avoidable security and audit exposure.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SafePaaS: user access review automation and strengthening access management
By the numbers:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, with 46% confirmed and 26% suspected.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations automate user access reviews without weakening audit evidence?
A: Organisations should automate the workflow, not the judgment.
Q: Why do access reviews fail to reduce privilege creep in practice?
A: They fail when review cadence is treated as the control instead of the decision and remediation that follow it.
Q: How do security teams know whether access certification is actually working?
A: Look for evidence that reviews are complete, decisions are consistent, and remediation closes the gap between approved and actual access.
Practitioner guidance
- Automate certification around role change events Trigger review workflows when employees move departments, change projects, or gain new system roles so stale access is visible before the next annual cycle.
- Require closure on every review decision Do not allow completed attestations without a linked remediation outcome for remove, retain, or exception.
- Map fine-grained entitlements before certifying access Build review scopes from the real permission model inside ERP and business-critical applications rather than from broad job titles alone.
What's in the full article
SafePaaS's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Configuration guidance for automating access review workflows across ERP and other business-critical systems.
- Examples of closed-loop remediation and audit trail handling inside the platform.
- Practical reporting detail for showing access certification outcomes to audit and compliance teams.
- Implementation-oriented visibility into fine-grained entitlements and privilege cleanup.
👉 Read SafePaaS's analysis of user access review automation and access risk →
User access review automation: is your governance keeping up?
Explore further
25/06/2026 4:06 pm
Access review automation is now a governance control for entitlement drift, not a productivity feature. Manual recertification collapses when access changes faster than humans can validate it. The article is right to frame automation as a way to reduce compliance risk, but the deeper issue is that identity programmes still rely on review cadence to compensate for weak entitlement hygiene. Practitioner implication: make certification a continuous control with enforced closure, not a periodic administrative event.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, with 46% confirmed and 26% suspected, according to the 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- The average organisation believes more than 1 in 5 of their non-human identities are insufficiently secured, which shows how quickly access sprawl becomes a governance problem.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own access review outcomes when privileged access is involved?
A: Ownership should sit with the business or application authority that can confirm need, while security enforces the process and validates evidence. For privileged access, that accountability must include a clear path from attestation to removal, exception approval, or escalation when high-risk rights are not justified.
👉 Read our full editorial: User access review automation is reshaping access governance
