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12/06/2026 10:21 pm
TL;DR: Zero Trust can add complexity, cost, manpower demands, performance friction, and productivity overhead when organisations try to apply it across users, devices, and applications, while also relying on adaptive access and stronger authentication to offset those pressures, according to Axiad. The real issue is not Zero Trust itself but whether identity governance can absorb the operating burden it creates.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Axiad: What Are the Disadvantages of Zero Trust? (And How to Overcome Them)
By the numbers:
- 90% of IT leaders say properly managing NHIs is essential for a successful zero-trust implementation.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations implement Zero Trust without creating too much friction?
A: Start with the highest-risk access paths and keep the policy model as simple as possible.
Q: Why do machine identities make Zero Trust harder to operate?
A: Machine identities often outnumber humans, move at higher speed, and depend on consistent policy decisions.
Q: What breaks when adaptive access control is deployed without good identity data?
A: Adaptive access becomes noisy and inconsistent when identity, device, or context signals are stale or incomplete.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory identity decision points Map every place where Zero Trust introduces an authorisation decision, then identify which of those paths affect human logins, service accounts, API tokens, and workload identities.
- Stress-test adaptive access policies Validate risk-based access rules against high-frequency machine-to-machine traffic so you can see where latency, false positives, or missing telemetry will break production access.
- Reduce identity friction before broad rollout Clean up stale entitlements, tighten role design, and remove duplicated access paths so MFA, passwordless, and policy checks do not push users toward insecure workarounds.
What's in the full article
Axiad's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Examples of how adaptive access changes day-to-day authentication and authorisation handling
- The vendor's own framing of MFA, passwordless access, and biometric options for reducing friction
- Practical guidance on balancing productivity and security across user access paths
- Additional commentary on authentication services and SSO SaaS platforms in a Zero Trust environment
👉 Read Axiad's blog post on the disadvantages of Zero Trust →
Zero Trust’s governance gap teams are still missing?
Explore further
13/06/2026 1:04 am
Zero Trust fails as a programme when identity lifecycle work is treated as secondary. The model adds value only when access governance, provisioning, review, and offboarding can keep pace with continuous verification. Without that discipline, organisations create more control points but not better control, and the burden shifts onto identity teams already managing human and machine access.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 90% of IT leaders say properly managing NHIs is essential for a successful zero-trust implementation, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which explains why Zero Trust programmes often stall at the machine-identity layer.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own Zero Trust governance across human and machine identities?
A: IAM, security architecture, and identity operations should share ownership, with explicit accountability for service accounts and workloads. Zero Trust only works when access policy, lifecycle management, and exception handling are governed as one programme rather than separate silos.
👉 Read our full editorial: Zero Trust disadvantages expose identity governance gaps
