Topic starter
12/06/2026 1:01 am
TL;DR: As cloud services, mobile access and remote work expand the attack surface, user access reviews become the control that keeps permissions aligned with business need, according to Zluri. Regular certification helps limit privilege creep, dormant accounts and compliance drift, but only if reviews are operationally enforced, not treated as a calendar exercise.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Zluri: “Identity as the New Perimeter: Role of User Access Reviews”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when access reviews are treated as a compliance exercise only?
A: You get sign-off without assurance.
Q: Why does remote work make access reviews less reliable?
A: Remote work increases the number of applications, devices, and collaboration paths that can carry access.
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
- Tighten certification scope around business roles Group entitlements by job function, application owner and access sensitivity so reviewers can decide on actual business need rather than raw entitlement lists.
- Link review outcomes to immediate deprovisioning Ensure every revoke, downgrade or exception created in a certification workflow triggers a removal action in the source system and is verified in the audit trail.
- Prioritise dormant and high-risk accounts first Focus the earliest review cycles on inactive users, contractors, privileged users and accounts tied to sensitive SaaS applications where excess access is most dangerous.
Bottom line: User access reviews have become a primary governance boundary because cloud and remote work weaken the old network perimeter.
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This topic was modified 4 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group
12/06/2026 10:39 am
Identity governance becomes the control plane when the perimeter disappears: The article captures a real operating shift, not a branding exercise. When users access SaaS, mobile endpoints and remote resources from many locations, the old perimeter model stops being the primary trust boundary. The governance consequence is that certification, provisioning discipline and role alignment become the practical perimeter for human access, and teams that still treat review cycles as administrative work are managing the wrong layer.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Over 70% of organisations lack automated access risk analysis, user access reviews and provisioning and deprovisioning, according to Pathlock's 2025 Digital Transformation and Access Risk Report.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should teams prioritise first: provisioning automation or access reviews?
A: If access assignment is still manual and inconsistent, provisioning automation usually comes first because it creates the control trail that reviews need. But reviews remain necessary to catch policy errors, inherited permissions, and exceptions that automation cannot safely infer. The two controls should reinforce each other, not compete.
👉 Read our full editorial: User access reviews are becoming the new identity perimeter
This post was modified 4 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group