How should security teams handle local accounts in cloud and SaaS apps?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Local accounts in cloud and SaaS apps are more than legacy clutter. They are often the escape hatch that bypasses central identity governance, conditional access, and lifecycle controls. That makes them a common source of over-privilege, weak accountability, and dormant access that survives employee turnover or vendor churn. In NHI programs, unmanaged local accounts behave like standing credentials: they are easy to forget, difficult to attest, and attractive to attackers once they are discovered.

The operational risk is well documented in NHI research. In The State of Non-Human Identity Security, 45% of organisations cited lack of credential rotation as the top cause of NHI-related attacks. Similar patterns show up in breach reporting, including the Snowflake breach and the Salesloft OAuth token breach, where stolen or unmanaged credentials enabled broad access far beyond what teams expected.

Current guidance from NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 supports inventory, access governance, and continuous monitoring, but the practical issue is sharper in SaaS: local accounts are easy to create and hard to retire. In practice, many security teams discover them only after a vendor audit, a merger, or an incident review rather than through intentional identity governance.

How It Works in Practice

Security teams should treat every local account as an exception that must earn its place. Start by inventorying accounts across cloud consoles, SaaS admin panels, support portals, and service desks, then classify each one by ownership, privilege, and business function. The key question is whether the account is tied to a real lifecycle and a named owner, or whether it exists because a product default, break-glass need, or forgotten migration created it.

From there, remediation should be tiered. High-risk accounts, especially those with admin, billing, data export, or token management rights, should be replaced with IdP-managed identities where possible. If replacement is not immediate, reduce blast radius through PAM, MFA, password resets, shorter session lifetimes, and stronger logging. For service and automation use cases, prefer workload identity, short-lived secrets, and JIT access over static local credentials. That approach is consistent with the least-privilege pattern reflected in The 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey, which found that over-privileged systems had a 76% incident rate versus 17% for least-privileged ones.

• Replace interactive local admin accounts with federated identity wherever the SaaS platform supports it.
• Use RBAC to narrow privileges, but verify that roles map to real operational tasks rather than broad job titles.
• Apply JIT elevation for support and emergency access, then revoke automatically after task completion.
• Monitor for stale accounts, shared passwords, and API keys that were created as one-off fixes.

Where local accounts cannot be removed, they should be tightly documented, tagged to an owner, and reviewed on a fixed cadence with evidence of use. This is especially important in platforms that still expose privileged local credentials, such as the issues discussed in Azure Key Vault privilege escalation exposure and the BeyondTrust API key breach. These controls tend to break down when SaaS products lack IdP federation or when administrators keep emergency accounts as permanent backdoors because no one wants to be locked out.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter control of local accounts often increases operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance access speed against governance. That tradeoff is real in SaaS admin recovery, mergers, third-party support, and regulated environments where a vendor still requires local break-glass access.

There is no universal standard for this yet, but current guidance suggests a simple rule: if a local account exists, it should be temporary, explainable, and monitored. Break-glass accounts are the most obvious exception, but they should be isolated, stored in a privileged vault, and tested regularly. Shared local admin accounts are a weaker pattern and should be retired first because they destroy accountability and complicate incident response. In environments with large numbers of integrations, the same discipline should extend to secrets and tokens, not just human logins, because a forgotten API key can be as powerful as a forgotten password.

For SaaS platforms that do not support federation, teams may need interim controls such as password vaulting, device-bound MFA, IP allowlisting, and strict login alerts. Even then, the goal is reduction, not normalisation. The lessons from the Codefinger AWS S3 ransomware attack and the 230M AWS environment compromise show how quickly standing access and weak visibility become broad compromise. In practice, the hardest cases are legacy SaaS tenants and multi-team admin models, where local accounts survive because no single owner wants to absorb the migration work.

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