IAM teams should look for proof of least privilege, role-based access, prompt offboarding, logging, and change management. Those are the control areas most likely to reveal whether identity governance is actually operating. If the report only provides a high-level assurance statement, ask for the specific tests, exceptions, and remediation notes behind it.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
SOC 2 evidence is often the first place IAM teams can tell whether a vendor’s identity controls are operating in practice or only on paper. For non-human identities, that distinction matters because service accounts, API keys, and automation tokens tend to accumulate access quietly and remain active long after they should have been removed. NHI Management Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs — The NHI Market shows that only 20% of organisations have formal offboarding and revocation processes for API keys, which makes evidence of prompt removal especially important.
For buyers, the report should help answer whether the vendor can actually prove least privilege, review cadence, logging, and remediation, not just assert that these controls exist. That aligns with the intent of NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, which expects governance and control outcomes to be demonstrable, not implied. In practice, many security teams discover control gaps only after a vendor incident, rather than through intentional due diligence.
How It Works in Practice
The most useful SOC 2 evidence is specific, testable, and tied to the exact control area IAM teams care about. A strong report will usually show the auditor’s test method, sample size, exceptions, management response, and whether remediation completed before the audit period closed. For identity review, that means looking beyond whether access reviews happened and asking who was reviewed, how non-human accounts were identified, and whether excessive privileges were actually removed.
For vendor environments that rely on automation, the evidence should also show how secrets and machine credentials are governed across provisioning, rotation, and offboarding. That is especially relevant given findings in the JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure case and the broader pattern of secret sprawl described in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — The NHI Market. Current guidance suggests asking for:
- Evidence of least privilege reviews for service accounts, API keys, and automation users
- Role assignment and approval records, including exceptions and compensating controls
- Offboarding proof showing when access was revoked after project end, termination, or vendor exit
- Log samples that demonstrate alerting, retention, and review of privileged activity
- Change management records for credential rotation, vault policy changes, and access rule updates
These controls tend to break down when vendors rely on shared admin accounts, manual key handling, or undocumented automation because the audit trail no longer maps cleanly to a specific identity or owner.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter evidence review often increases procurement friction, requiring organisations to balance speed against assurance. That tradeoff is real when a vendor provides a clean SOC 2 summary but limited underlying test detail, or when the control exists only for human users while machine identities are handled by a different operational team.
There is no universal standard for how deeply SOC 2 should expose non-human identity controls, so IAM teams need to calibrate scrutiny to risk. A low-risk vendor may justify summary-level evidence plus remediation notes, but a vendor handling privileged integrations, secrets, or automated access to production should be expected to show deeper proof. The risk is especially high when the report omits exceptions, because exceptions often reveal where policy and reality diverge.
Where questions remain, map the evidence back to the control outcomes in NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and compare them against the operational patterns documented by NHI Management Group. That includes the privilege escalation exposure seen in Azure Key Vault privilege escalation exposure, where access design mattered more than policy language. In practice, many teams accept a polished assurance statement only to learn later that the vendor never tested the controls that matter most.
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 CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 | Least-privilege and access review evidence maps directly to NHI governance. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | SOC 2 access evidence should prove permissions are authorized and reviewed. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.DS-1 | Logging and secret handling in vendor evidence support data protection expectations. |
Verify vendor NHI entitlements are minimized, reviewed, and removed when no longer needed.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 23, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
