How can organisations reduce risk from shared privileged accounts?

Why Shared Privileged Accounts Create Excess Risk

shared privileged account remove the two controls that matter most in incident response and audit: attribution and containment. When multiple administrators, contractors, or automation jobs use the same credential, there is no reliable way to prove who approved a change, who executed it, or whether the action matched policy. That weakens deterrence, complicates forensics, and turns one compromised credential into a broad access path. The practical risk is not just “too many people know the password.” Shared access also makes offboarding incomplete, password rotation disruptive, and emergency use hard to distinguish from routine use. Current guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 aligns with the broader Zero Trust view that identities, not network location, should drive authorization decisions. NHI Management Group research shows why this matters: 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, and 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys in Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks. In practice, many security teams discover shared-account abuse only after an incident has already obscured the real actor.

How to Replace Shared Access Without Breaking Operations

The safest replacement is not simply “more passwords.” It is a model where each privileged action is tied to one person or one workload identity, with access granted only when needed and only for the narrow task at hand. For human admins, that usually means individual accounts, strong MFA, PAM, and JIT elevation. For service workflows, it means workload identity and short-lived secrets instead of static shared credentials. A workable pattern is to separate standing access from elevated access:

• Use individual named admin identities for every human operator.
• Issue JIT privileged sessions through PAM so elevation is temporary and approved.
• Replace shared secrets with per-system or per-operator tokens, certificates, or ephemeral credentials.
• Log every elevation, command, and approval against a single identity.
• Rotate or revoke credentials automatically on role change, offboarding, or incident trigger.

This is consistent with the accountability model in NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, especially the emphasis on access control and continuous governance. It also matches NHI guidance in Top 10 NHI Issues, where overbroad privilege and poor lifecycle handling are recurring failure points. When a shared account is unavoidable for a short transition period, current best practice is to time-box it, record the business owner, and treat it as an exception requiring review rather than a permanent control design. These controls tend to break down in legacy infrastructure, where applications cannot distinguish users and administrators still depend on static local accounts.

Common Variations, Exceptions, and Migration Tradeoffs

Tighter privileged access often increases operational friction, so organisations need to balance control strength against uptime, vendor support, and emergency recovery. The main tradeoff is that not every environment can move from shared access to fully individualised access overnight. Legacy appliances, third-party managed services, and break-glass procedures may still require shared credentials for a limited time, but that should be treated as an exception with compensating controls. A practical migration path is to reduce the blast radius before you eliminate the account entirely:

• Split broad shared accounts into role-specific accounts with narrower scope.
• Wrap legacy access in PAM so password disclosure is hidden from operators.
• Use session recording and command logging for every privileged action.
• Apply RBAC to keep routine work separate from elevation paths.
• Set a retirement date for each shared account and enforce owner sign-off.

The Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Why NHI Security Matters Now is useful here because it shows how credential sprawl and poor lifecycle management create lasting exposure. For organisations modernising toward Zero Trust, shared privileged accounts are usually a transitional risk, not a target state. There is no universal standard for every exception pattern yet, but current guidance suggests that if shared access must exist, it should be short-lived, heavily monitored, and owned by a named manager who is accountable for retirement. In mature programmes, the shared account disappears only after access design, operational workflows, and audit evidence all support the replacement model.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How can organisations reduce risk from certificate sprawl and stale trust?
• Why do privileged accounts matter so much in NHI risk management?
• When should organisations use CIEM to reduce risk?
• Why do non-human identities create more audit risk than human accounts?