How should organisations reduce access risk when many people need to work with the same credentials or tools?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

When many users need the same credential or tool, the real risk is not convenience, it is loss of accountability. Shared access makes it harder to know who acted, which request was legitimate, and whether a credential was reused outside its intended scope. That weakens detective controls, complicates incident response, and creates easy paths for overuse or silent misuse. The risk is especially acute for secrets used in automation, where a single leak can spread quickly across teams and systems.

NHIMG research on the Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge shows how access grows organically unless teams deliberately constrain it. External guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 reinforces that unmanaged non-human credentials and over-broad sharing are core security failures, not just operational nuisances. In practice, many security teams discover shared credential abuse only after a tool account has already been reused beyond its intended purpose.

How It Works in Practice

The strongest pattern is to treat shared access as an exception, not a default. Start by identifying each credential or tool account, then assign a business owner, a technical owner, and a documented access purpose. For anything that multiple people must use, create a request path that is fast enough to be followed, but still records approval, scope, and expiry. That is the practical middle ground between open sharing and excessive bureaucracy.

In environments with secrets, API keys, service accounts, or administrative tooling, a good control set usually includes:

• Named ownership for every shared credential, with an explicit use case.
• Access groups or role mappings instead of direct distribution wherever possible.
• Time-limited access for elevated use, so access ends automatically when the task ends.
• Central logging of who requested, approved, used, and revoked access.
• Regular review of actual usage against the approved list of users.

For credentials that cannot be made unique immediately, pair strong password hygiene with vaulting, rotation, and tight retrieval controls. NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Static vs Dynamic Secrets explains why dynamic secrets reduce blast radius compared with long-lived shared values. NIST control guidance in NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls supports least privilege, account management, and auditability as the foundation for this model. These controls tend to break down when teams use shared credentials for emergency access across many systems because the approval trail is often incomplete and revocation is delayed.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter control often increases coordination cost, requiring organisations to balance operational speed against visibility and revocation quality. That tradeoff is real for engineering teams, support desks, and cloud operators who need fast access during incidents. Current guidance suggests that the answer is not blanket prohibition, but reducing the number of genuinely shared credentials and making the remaining ones time-bound, monitored, and reviewable.

There is no universal standard for every environment, but a few patterns are consistent. Shared break-glass accounts should be rare, heavily monitored, and tested so they do not become everyday workarounds. Vendor-managed tools may require shared access temporarily, but they still need owner assignment, session logging, and rotation discipline. For automation-heavy environments, the better long-term fix is usually workload identity or per-user delegation, so access can be attributed without exposing one password to many people. The 52 NHI Breaches Analysis is useful context for how often poor identity hygiene turns into a breach path, while the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 supports governance, access control, and continuous review as recurring practices rather than one-time cleanup. When teams cannot attribute access to a named user or trusted workflow, the control has already weakened.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

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• How do organisations reduce the dwell time of exposed credentials at scale?
• How can organisations reduce vendor access risk without stopping external work?
• How can organisations reduce the risk of source code, credentials, and regulated data leaking into generative AI tools?