What should organisations do before consolidating identity and device management?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Consolidating identity and device management sounds efficient, but it can also hide control failures if the current environment is already fragmented. The first risk is not tooling, it is blind merger of duplicated entitlements, policy exceptions, and logs into a single plane that preserves bad defaults at scale. NHI Mgmt Group’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts, which is exactly the kind of gap that makes consolidation dangerous.

Security teams also need to distinguish human, non-human, and autonomous identities before rationalising controls. A device identity, a service account, and an AI agent may all authenticate, but they do not share the same lifecycle, revocation path, or acceptable use profile. Without that separation, consolidation can make governance look cleaner while leaving privileged pathways untouched. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 reinforces the need for asset, identity, and access visibility before major platform changes. In practice, many security teams discover this only after consolidation has already spread legacy exceptions into the new control plane, rather than through deliberate design.

How It Works in Practice

Before any consolidation project, organisations should build a baseline that shows where identity sprawl and device sprawl overlap, and where they do not. That means inventorying service accounts, API keys, certificates, human accounts, machine identities, managed devices, unmanaged devices, and any autonomous workload identity. It also means mapping where access is granted, where it is exempted, and where logs are actually collected. For NHI-specific preparation, NHI Mgmt Group recommends starting with lifecycle and offboarding visibility in the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide and the Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs section.

A practical pre-consolidation checklist usually includes:

• Identifying duplicate entitlements across IAM, MDM, PAM, and application-native access systems.
• Cataloguing policy exceptions and deciding which are justified, temporary, or simply inherited drift.
• Normalising log sources so authentication, authorization, device posture, and secret usage can be correlated.
• Separating lifecycle rules for human users, NHI workloads, and autonomous systems before any policy migration.
• Validating offboarding and revocation workflows for API keys, tokens, certificates, and device trust records.

This is where consolidated governance should be designed, not assumed. The goal is to reduce administrative overhead while preserving the right control boundaries, especially where NHI-heavy estates already carry excessive privilege or weak rotation discipline. The Regulatory and Audit Perspectives material is useful here because auditors will usually ask whether the merged platform improved control evidence or merely centralised old problems under a new console. These controls tend to break down when identity and device repositories are merged before the organisation has a trustworthy source of record for ownership, revocation, and exception management.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter consolidation often reduces operational overhead, but it also increases the blast radius of mistakes, so organisations have to balance efficiency against recovery risk. There is no universal standard for whether identity and device management should be unified in one platform or federated across several; current guidance suggests the decision should follow trust boundaries, not procurement convenience. That is especially true when contractors, third parties, or privileged automation already depend on separate authentication paths.

Some environments should delay consolidation entirely. Highly regulated systems, hybrid estates with legacy directory dependencies, and environments that expose NHIs to third parties may need a staged approach with compensating controls. NHI Mgmt Group’s Top 10 NHI Issues and the Ultimate Guide to NHIs both point to the same operational reality: visibility and lifecycle discipline have to exist before the platform move, not after it. If that baseline is missing, consolidation can hide shadow access, prolong stale credentials, and make exception cleanup far harder.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• What should organisations measure before consolidating identity and device administration?
• What should organisations do when mobile device management and identity policy conflict?
• What should organisations do before auditing AI regulation readiness?
• What should identity teams ask before approving AI platform expansion?