Who should be accountable for non-human access across cloud services?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

Accountability for non-human access cannot sit only with the team that creates a service account or approves a cloud integration. Non-human identities span IAM, application ownership, platform operations, and security oversight, which means failures often appear as ownership gaps rather than isolated misconfigurations. The real risk is not just excess access, but unclear responsibility for reviewing, revoking, and monitoring that access across environments.

NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs treats this as an operating-model problem as much as a technical one. Current industry research also shows the scale of the issue: 88.5% of organisations say their non-human IAM practices lag behind or only match their human IAM maturity, according to The 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report from Aembit. That gap matters because cloud services are easy to connect and hard to inventory once they proliferate.

Security teams should expect accountability to be shared, but not diffuse. IAM owns governance, cloud and application owners own business justification, and platform teams own the operational controls that keep access current. In practice, many security teams encounter shadow integrations and stale secrets only after a cloud incident has already exposed them.

How It Works in Practice

A workable accountability model starts with assigning one named control owner for each non-human identity, secret, or workload credential. That owner is responsible for the full lifecycle: request, approval, provisioning, periodic review, rotation, monitoring, and retirement. Security can define the policy, but it should not be the only team expected to act when an access path becomes risky.

For cloud services, the right model usually combines central governance with delegated approval. IAM or security sets the rules, while the application owner validates why the access exists and the cloud platform owner ensures the technical binding is correct. This aligns with guidance in the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and the control expectations in NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls, especially where least privilege, access review, and traceability are concerned.

In practice, accountability should include:

• one system owner for each cloud workload identity or service principal
• one approving business owner who can confirm the access is still needed
• one operational owner who can rotate secrets, reduce privileges, and remove stale bindings
• continuous monitoring that flags unused access, privilege expansion, and cross-account use

NHIMG’s 52 NHI Breaches Analysis shows how often these failures become visible only after abuse or overreach has already occurred. These controls tend to break down in multi-cloud environments where each platform exposes different identity primitives, because ownership is split across systems that do not share a common review cadence.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter accountability often increases administrative overhead, requiring organisations to balance governance quality against operational speed. That tradeoff becomes sharper when cloud teams provision access for automation, CI/CD pipelines, or third-party integrations that change frequently.

There is no universal standard for this yet, but current guidance suggests the accountable party should follow the system of record for risk. If a workload identity can deploy code, modify infrastructure, or access customer data, then the team that owns the business service should share accountability with security for the permissions behind it. If the access is shared across departments, a single owner still needs to be designated for review and remediation.

Edge cases are common when vendors, managed services, and temporary projects are involved. In those cases, account ownership should not default to the person who first created the credential. Instead, organisations should require explicit reassignment when the original requestor leaves, the integration changes, or the service is repurposed. The Azure Key Vault privilege escalation exposure case is a useful reminder that access control failures often begin as ownership failures, not purely technical ones.

For organisations standardising accountability, the practical question is simple: who can prove the access is still justified, who can remove it, and who will be held responsible when that answer is missing?

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• Who is accountable for securing non-human identities across onboarding, rotation, and offboarding?
• How should organisations implement just-in-time access for human and non-human identities in cloud environments?
• Who is accountable for maintaining right-time, right-level access across cloud and business systems?
• Who is accountable for workload access governance when federated identities are used across cloud and CI systems?