Should organisations adopt open standards for authorization now?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Open standards matter because authorisation is no longer a single-app decision. Modern environments have NHIs moving across cloud services, SaaS, CI/CD, and automated workflows, so policy has to follow the workload rather than sit inside each application. The practical risk is fragmentation: one team writes custom rules, another hard-codes entitlements, and a third copies claims into local logic. That is exactly how drift, privilege sprawl, and inconsistent enforcement enter the stack.

NHI Mgmt Group research shows that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, which makes inconsistent authorisation even more dangerous. Open standards help reduce that problem by giving security teams a common way to express identity signals, policy inputs, and enforcement decisions, while keeping the implementation portable across platforms. That aligns with the direction of NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, where access control and governance are meant to be measurable, repeatable, and adaptable.

Practitioners should also treat standards as an operating model, not just a procurement preference. A policy format that works across environments is only useful if it can be audited, versioned, and tied back to identity lifecycle controls described in Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Standards. In practice, many security teams encounter authorisation inconsistency only after a privileged workflow or API key has already been abused, rather than through intentional design.

How It Works in Practice

Adopting open standards usually means separating three layers: identity proof, policy decision, and enforcement. For NHIs, that often starts with workload identity, because the system needs to know what the service, agent, or automation actually is before it can decide what it may do. Standards-based identity can then feed a policy engine that evaluates context at request time, which is far more scalable than embedding rules into each application.

In practice, teams combine policy-as-code with short-lived credentials and explicit scopes. That makes it possible to issue JIT access for a task, revoke it automatically on completion, and avoid long-lived static secrets. This is especially important where automation spans multiple clouds or where services need to call downstream APIs in a chained workflow. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 is useful here because it reinforces repeatable control mapping, while Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Standards provides the NHI-specific governance context for where these controls fit.

• Use a common policy language or decision layer so the same authorisation logic can be enforced across applications.
• Bind policy to workload identity, not just to IP address, network location, or a static role.
• Prefer ephemeral secrets and JIT provisioning over standing credentials wherever the workflow allows it.
• Log policy decisions with enough context to support review, incident response, and access recertification.

This approach works best when the organisation can centralise policy decisions without centralising every application’s business logic. These controls tend to break down in legacy systems that cannot accept external policy checks or short-lived tokens because access decisions remain trapped inside hard-coded application code.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter standardisation often increases integration and governance overhead, requiring organisations to balance portability against delivery speed. That tradeoff is real, especially when some platforms support modern policy engines and others only support coarse RBAC. Current guidance suggests starting with the highest-risk NHIs and the most shared policy domains, rather than forcing a full rewrite of every authorisation path at once.

There is no universal standard for this yet, so organisations should be careful not to confuse “open” with “automatically interoperable.” Some environments will still need translation layers between identity providers, policy engines, and application-specific claims. The key is to avoid custom logic becoming the source of truth. If a vendor supports standards such as externalised policy evaluation, token-based workload identity, or consistent claims mapping, that is usually preferable to bespoke authorization code that cannot be audited across systems.

Another edge case is highly autonomous automation, where the question shifts from “what role does this account have?” to “what is this agent trying to do right now?” In those cases, current best practice is evolving toward context-aware authorization and ephemeral credentialing, but the operational model is still maturing. Security teams should validate that the chosen standard can support runtime policy checks and short TTLs before they rely on it for agentic or multi-step workflows. Without that, the system may look standardised while still hiding standing privilege behind a modern interface.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• When should organisations prioritise Zero Standing Privilege for non-human identities?
• How can organisations reduce secret leakage in ServiceNow at scale?
• How do organisations reduce false positives in secret detection pipelines?
• What is the difference between RBAC and policy-based authorization for NHIs?