Identity teams should start with the highest-risk access paths, especially systems where users can combine create, approve, and post privileges. Those are the environments where toxic combinations most often translate into fraud, misconfiguration, or failed audit evidence. Fixing those paths gives the fastest reduction in business risk.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
When governance is weak, identity teams do not have the luxury of fixing everything at once. The first priority is to stop the highest-risk access paths from turning into business events, especially where one identity can create, approve, and post, or where a service account can reach production and sensitive data with little oversight. NHI Management Group’s research on the Top 10 NHI Issues shows how quickly weak governance becomes an operational problem, not just a control gap.
That focus aligns with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, which pushes teams toward prioritising the assets and access paths most likely to drive material harm. In practice, the issue is not missing policy language. It is that toxic combinations, unreviewed entitlements, and dormant secrets often sit inside the workflows that matter most to finance, engineering, and cloud operations. The fastest risk reduction comes from removing those combinations before widening the programme. In practice, many security teams encounter failed audits, fraud, or production misuse only after a privilege path has already been abused.
How It Works in Practice
The practical starting point is a short, ruthless triage of identities, entitlements, and workflows. Identity teams should rank access paths by blast radius, then by how easily they can be abused without detection. The goal is not perfect governance on day one. The goal is to remove the combinations that let one account both initiate and validate a sensitive action, or let a machine identity operate beyond the purpose it was created for.
Current guidance suggests a three-part method:
- Identify the systems where create, approve, and post privileges overlap, especially in finance, procurement, CI/CD, cloud admin, and IAM administration.
- Review non-human identities and secrets that have broad reuse, long TTLs, or unclear ownership, using lifecycle discipline from the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Apply immediate compensating controls such as temporary least privilege, stronger approvals, logging, and credential rotation before attempting full redesign.
That sequencing matters because weak governance usually hides in inherited permissions and exception-heavy environments. The 52 NHI Breaches Analysis shows that the path to compromise often starts with exposed or over-permissioned identities, not sophisticated initial access. Teams should use this first pass to establish ownership, remove stale access, and force high-risk workflows through review points that can actually be enforced. These controls tend to break down when access is fragmented across SaaS, cloud, and legacy systems because no single team can see the full privilege chain.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter access control often increases operational friction, so organisations have to balance speed against the risk of leaving powerful paths untouched. That tradeoff is especially visible in engineering and platform teams, where emergency access, automation, and service accounts can be mistaken for harmless exceptions. Best practice is evolving, but the current consensus is that exceptions should be rare, time-bound, and explicitly owned, not informally tolerated.
Some environments need a different first move. For example, if reporting is unreliable, identity teams may need to begin with inventory and ownership mapping before they can safely remove access. If a business process depends on one account performing multiple steps, the immediate fix may be detective control and segregation planning rather than instant redesign. The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities reports that 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect an NHI breach, which is a strong signal that reactive cleanup is no substitute for prioritisation.
In low-maturity environments, the right first step is often not a full IAM programme overhaul but a risk register of the top few access paths that can create fraud, misconfiguration, or audit failure. That approach gives identity teams something actionable while the broader governance model is still being built.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Prioritises least-privilege control over the highest-risk access paths. |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-01 | Weak governance often starts with unmanaged or over-privileged NHIs. |
| NIST AI RMF | Risk prioritisation and governance are core to managing autonomous identity behaviour. |
Use GOVERN and MAP functions to rank identity risk before expanding control coverage.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- How should IAM teams prioritise identity governance deployment?
- Should organisations prioritise external exposure or internal credential governance first?
- How do security teams know whether identity governance is reducing risk?
- How should security teams modernise a failing identity governance platform?
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 24, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
