How can organisations reduce manual effort in access certification and evidence collection?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Manual certification work becomes expensive when entitlement catalogs, ticketing data, and evidence trails live in different systems and speak different languages. The real problem is not only volume. It is also ambiguity: reviewers cannot tell whether a role is business meaningful, whether a transaction proves actual use, or whether a change record closes the loop on access. NHI governance worsens this because service accounts, API keys, and automation credentials often outnumber human identities by orders of magnitude, and only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.

That is why certification programs should shift from spreadsheet review to evidence assembly. Reviewers need a single path that connects identity, privilege, and operational proof, rather than asking auditors to reconcile exports by hand. The OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 also highlights that weak governance around NHIs creates repeatable exposure, not isolated exceptions. In practice, many security teams only discover the cost of fragmented review after a recertification cycle stalls, a sampling request lands, or an access exception cannot be justified quickly enough.

How It Works in Practice

The fastest way to reduce manual effort is to standardise the inputs before you automate the workflow. Start by normalising entitlement data so that equivalent access appears under one naming pattern, one owner, and one business term. Then collapse multiple evidence sources into a single review package that links identity state, transaction history, and change records. That lets approvers confirm both who has access and whether the access was actually used.

Operationally, the review path should treat NHIs differently from human accounts where needed. Static role-based review alone often fails for machine identities because technical entitlements do not map neatly to business roles. Current guidance suggests pairing RBAC with context from ownership, workload purpose, and rotation state, especially for secrets and API keys. For deeper background on how non-human accounts become hard to govern at scale, see the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — What are Non-Human Identities and the section on Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks.

• Use a single entitlement taxonomy so reviewers do not reclassify the same access each quarter.
• Pre-attach evidence from IAM, SIEM, CMDB, and change systems to the certification record.
• Flag dormant, over-privileged, or unowned NHIs for exception handling before the review starts.
• Use risk-based sampling for low-variance access, then reserve full review for privileged or internet-facing accounts.

The practical goal is to make certification look like governed data reconciliation, not forensic research. These controls tend to break down when entitlement data is generated by many legacy directories and bespoke scripts because ownership, naming, and lifecycle state diverge too far to trust automation.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter standardisation often increases upfront governance effort, requiring organisations to balance faster reviews against catalogue clean-up and process redesign. That tradeoff matters most where access models are heavily customised, such as shared service accounts, DevOps pipelines, outsourced operations, or M&A environments with overlapping directories. There is no universal standard for this yet, so the best practice is evolving rather than settled.

In high-churn environments, evidence collection should be event-driven as well as periodic. For example, a change to an application owner, rotation failure, or unusually broad token scope can trigger a targeted review outside the normal cycle. The 52 NHI Breaches Analysis shows why this matters: access problems often persist because governance lags behind operational change, not because the issue was invisible from day one. The JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure case is another reminder that leaked or overbroad secrets create evidence gaps as well as exposure, since reviewers then have to prove both control failure and scope of use.

For audit teams, the edge case is not whether access exists, but whether the organisation can prove why it still exists. That is why many mature programs pair certification with JIT access, short-lived secrets, and explicit owner attestations for exceptions. The result is less manual collection, but only if the workflow is designed around the lifecycle of the account and the business activity it supports.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How can organisations reduce the blast radius of compromised agent identities?
• How do organisations reduce the dwell time of exposed credentials at scale?
• How should security teams run access reviews for non-human identities?
• How should security teams govern non-human identities that have persistent access?