How should security teams use access behavior to improve identity governance without creating unnecessary removals of valid access?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Access behavior is one of the most useful signals for identity governance because it shows what an identity actually uses, not just what it was once granted. The risk is that usage data can be misleading without business context. A service account may run only at month end, an API key may support a recovery path, and a human account may be dormant until an audit window opens. Behaviour driven governance must therefore improve least privilege without turning into indiscriminate cleanup.

This matters even more for NHIs, where standing access is common and weak lifecycle discipline often hides in plain sight. NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, which is why access review needs to distinguish between truly unused rights and rights that are simply infrequent. The same pattern appears in broader governance guidance from NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10, both of which emphasise risk-based decision making rather than purely mechanical removal. In practice, many security teams discover over-removal only after a seasonal workflow, break-glass process, or third-party integration has already failed.

How It Works in Practice

Effective behaviour-driven governance combines three inputs: observed usage, entitlement inventory, and operational context. Usage tells security teams which permissions are exercised. Entitlements show the full granted surface. Context explains why an access right exists, who approved it, and whether it supports a known business process. Without all three, access review tools can flag a permission as dormant when it is simply episodic.

A practical workflow usually starts by grouping identities into reviewable populations: human users, service accounts, third-party integrations, and agentic workloads. For each identity, teams compare last-used data, frequency, privilege sensitivity, and dependency mapping. Then they validate with application owners or system owners before removal. For NHIs, this is especially important because a key may be used by a job that runs once a quarter, and an agent may only call a tool under a specific runtime condition. NHIMG’s Top 10 NHI Issues and the NHI lifecycle guidance in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs both reinforce that governance must include ongoing review, not one-time cleanups.

• Use last-seen activity to identify candidates, not to auto-revoke on its own.
• Require an owner or approver to confirm whether low use is expected.
• Preserve approved exceptions with expiry dates and documented rationale.
• Link removals to change windows so operational teams can test impacted workflows.
• Prefer step-down actions, such as reducing scope first, before full removal.

Where possible, align the workflow to control families in NIST CSF and NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, especially access review, least privilege, and configuration management. These controls tend to break down when review data is stale, ownership is unclear, and a shared service account supports multiple hidden dependencies.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter governance often increases review time and operational friction, so organisations must balance least privilege against business continuity. That tradeoff is real, especially in environments with seasonal processing, emergency support roles, or shared automation accounts.

Best practice is evolving for agentic and highly dynamic workloads. For AI agents and autonomous systems, static RBAC alone is usually too blunt because the access need changes by task. Current guidance suggests pairing behavioural signals with runtime policy decisions, short-lived credentials, and explicit task boundaries rather than treating prior usage as a permanent entitlement baseline. This is consistent with Ultimate Guide to NHIs findings on excessive privilege and with the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10, which treats unmanaged access growth as a recurring control failure.

For high-risk systems, teams should exempt break-glass accounts, regulated retention jobs, and externally managed integrations from automatic removal until a human review confirms the dependency. In those cases, the better control is not deletion but tighter TTLs, stronger ownership, and more frequent revalidation. Current guidance suggests that behaviour data should inform governance decisions, not replace them. These controls tend to break down in shared-service environments where one identity supports many business processes and the access trail does not cleanly map to a single owner.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• How should security teams delegate access governance across large engineering organisations without creating cross-team risk?
• How should security teams use identity analytics to improve access governance?
• How should security teams use machine learning in identity governance without overtrusting automated access decisions?
• How should security teams use an event like a security conference to improve identity and privileged access governance?