Organisations keep paying for seats that no longer support a business need and preserve access that should have been removed. Without usage evidence, renewal becomes automatic entitlement persistence, which weakens access reviews and makes cleanup harder later.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
When SaaS renewal decisions are disconnected from usage evidence, entitlement drift becomes a budgeting problem and an access problem at the same time. Teams renew dormant seats because the contract is easier to keep than the evidence is to gather, while stale accounts and inactive integrations remain live long after business need has ended. That is especially risky for service accounts, API keys, and app-to-app connections that do not show up in normal user activity reporting. Guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and NHIMG’s regulatory and audit perspective both point to the same operational reality: access that is not measured is rarely removed on time.
NHI Management Group has documented how opaque lifecycle management amplifies this issue, with only 5.7% of organisations having full visibility into their service accounts in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs. Without usage data, renewal teams cannot distinguish an actively supporting integration from an abandoned one, so renewals silently preserve standing access and delay cleanup until an audit, incident, or cost review forces the issue. In practice, many security teams encounter this only after dormant access has already survived one or more renewal cycles, rather than through intentional lifecycle control.
How It Works in Practice
The fix is to treat renewal as a control point, not a procurement formality. Security, IT, and SaaS owners need a single renewal package that includes usage telemetry, owner confirmation, privilege scope, last access date, and business justification. For human seats, that may come from sign-in logs and feature usage. For NHIs, it often requires correlating API logs, token activity, vault records, and application telemetry. NHIMG’s Guide to the Secret Sprawl Challenge is useful here because secret sprawl often hides the very integrations that renewal managers think are still active.
- Use usage data to classify each license or integration as active, inactive, deprecated, or unknown.
- Require an owner attestation before renewal, with explicit justification for any item lacking recent activity.
- Separate business continuity exceptions from default renewals so dormant access does not renew by inertia.
- Feed renewal outcomes into access reviews, offboarding, and secret rotation plans.
This approach aligns with NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide, both of which emphasise visibility, governance, and continuous control validation over periodic cleanup. One NHIMG stat makes the risk plain: 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after notification, showing how slowly access remediation can move once entitlement persists. These controls tend to break down when SaaS ownership is decentralised across business units because no single team has both the usage data and the authority to deny renewal.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter renewal governance often increases coordination overhead, requiring organisations to balance administrative effort against the risk of paying for unused access. There is no universal standard for this yet, but current guidance suggests that high-risk or high-spend SaaS should receive the strongest evidence requirements first.
Some environments are harder than others. Shared workspaces may show low per-user activity even when the application is still valuable, so renewal decisions should rely on feature-level usage rather than raw logins. Conversely, automation-heavy platforms can look active while a specific integration is no longer needed, which is why owners must validate both human and non-human dependencies. For identity and secret governance, NHIMG’s Top 10 NHI Issues remains a practical reference for spotting where renewal hygiene and access hygiene diverge.
Edge cases also include regulatory retention needs, merger transitions, and vendor-managed integrations. In those cases, the right response is usually not automatic renewal, but a documented exception with a shorter review cycle and a named control owner. The operational failure shows up when procurement renews first and identity teams learn later that the contract preserved access nobody can now justify.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-03 | Renewal without usage evidence prolongs stale NHI credentials. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Access review discipline depends on knowing which entitlements are still used. |
| NIST AI RMF | Governance requires continuous monitoring of decisions and downstream access impact. |
Use renewal checkpoints to validate access necessity and remove entitlements with no recent use.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 11, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
