Approval should sit with someone who can validate business need and risk, usually a manager, system owner, or delegated control point defined by policy. The important issue is not the job title alone, but whether the approver can meaningfully confirm scope, urgency, and expiry before access is granted.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
just in time access only reduces risk if the approval step is meaningful. For human workflows, that means an approver can confirm the task, the scope, and the expiry before privileges are issued. For NHI and agent-driven workflows, the risk is sharper because access is often granted to credentials, tokens, or toolchains that can be reused faster than a ticket can be reviewed.
That is why approval should not be treated as a formality or a rubber stamp. Current guidance from the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and the Ultimate Guide to NHIs points toward governance that ties approval to business ownership, risk ownership, and auditable policy. NHI Mgmt Group data shows that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, which makes weak approval paths especially dangerous.
In practice, many security teams discover that approval authority was never clearly assigned until an over-privileged access path has already been used.
How It Works in Practice
The right approver depends on what is being requested and who can actually assess the blast radius. For low-risk operational access, a line manager or delegated team lead may be enough. For access to production systems, secrets, or sensitive NHI toolchains, approval usually needs a system owner, application owner, or a designated control point under policy. The approver should be able to answer three questions before access is granted: does the requester need it, is the scope appropriate, and does the expiry match the task?
For NHI-heavy environments, the approval workflow should be paired with enforced limits. That usually means:
- task-specific approvals rather than standing approvals
- time-bound access with automatic expiry
- scope limited to a named system, role, or secret set
- audit logs that record who approved, what was approved, and why
- policy checks that block approval if the request exceeds risk thresholds
Where autonomous workloads are involved, approval should increasingly be tied to workload identity and runtime policy rather than a human title alone. That is consistent with Zero Trust thinking in NIST SP 800-207, where access is continuously evaluated instead of assumed after one-time trust. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Key Challenges and Risks also highlights how excessive privileges and weak visibility make access governance fragile. Approval breaks down when requesters can self-select approvers, when managers lack system context, or when emergency access bypasses the normal control point because the process is too slow.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter approval control often increases operational friction, so organisations have to balance speed against assurance. That tradeoff is real: a production incident, a vendor support case, and a routine admin task rarely deserve the same approver path.
Best practice is evolving toward delegated approval models with clear thresholds. For example, a manager may approve standard JIT requests, while a system owner must approve production secrets, privileged API keys, or access to high-impact NHI accounts. In some environments, especially where service accounts or agent identities are involved, there is no universal standard for this yet. Current guidance suggests requiring a policy-defined control point that can validate purpose, scope, and TTL, rather than relying on department hierarchy alone.
There are also edge cases where approval should be conditional or multi-step. High-risk requests may need dual approval, security review, or automated policy validation before a human approver can sign off. This is especially important when the access path touches shared vaults, CI/CD systems, or third-party integrations, where one approval can indirectly unlock many downstream credentials. NHI Mgmt Group research indicates that 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers, which makes the approval point even more important as a compensating control.
When access is too broad, too persistent, or too hard to trace back to a named owner, the approval process itself becomes a weak link rather than a safeguard.
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 Zero Trust (SP 800-207) set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-03 | JIT approval must limit NHI privilege scope and duration. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Access approvals are part of managing and enforcing permissions. |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | Zero Trust requires access decisions to be context-aware and time-bound. |
Tie each approved request to a least-privilege scope and auto-expire it when the task ends.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 25, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
