Who should be prioritised first in an access review campaign?

Why This Matters for Security Teams

An access review campaign only works if the first pass targets the identities with the highest blast radius. Administrators, service accounts with broad reach, and power users can bypass ordinary controls, so a single over-entitled account can expose multiple systems at once. That is why NHI Management Group treats access review as a risk-reduction exercise, not a box-ticking exercise. The OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 reinforces this point: privileged identities deserve the earliest scrutiny because compromise tends to scale faster than defenders expect.

Security teams also need to distinguish between broad access and routine access. An account that touches production, data stores, deployment pipelines, or secrets systems carries far more exposure than a standard application user. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs explains why unmanaged non-human identities become long-lived risk multipliers when entitlement reviews lag behind system change.

In practice, many security teams discover the most dangerous access only after an incident response review has already shown how far a single identity could move.

How It Works in Practice

Priority should be based on impact first, then volume. Start with identities that can create, change, or delete access, alter infrastructure, read sensitive data, or mint new credentials. These often include domain admins, cloud administrators, CI/CD service accounts, privileged API clients, and break-glass accounts. Next, review identities with broad inheritance, such as group memberships, shared roles, and accounts used across multiple environments. The goal is to remove standing privilege before it is exercised.

A practical campaign usually follows a sequence:

• Identify identities with administrative or cross-system permissions.
• Map each identity to the systems it can reach, especially production and secrets repositories.
• Check whether the access is still needed for the current job, project, or automation flow.
• Remove unnecessary entitlements, then validate the account still functions with least privilege.
• Set follow-up review cadence based on risk tier, not on calendar convenience.

This approach aligns well with the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide, which treats entitlement review as part of identity hygiene across provisioning, use, rotation, and retirement. It also fits the OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 emphasis on overprivileged and long-lived credentials. For teams working with secrets-heavy environments, NHIMG research shows how quickly exposure can cascade: the State of Secrets in AppSec reports an average 27 days to remediate a leaked secret, which makes reducing high-risk entitlements even more urgent.

These controls tend to break down in federated environments where ownership is unclear, shadow service accounts are common, and permissions are inherited through nested groups that no one fully inventories.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter review cycles often increase operational overhead, requiring organisations to balance faster risk reduction against the time needed to validate business exceptions. That tradeoff is real, especially when engineering teams depend on elevated access for emergency support, release pipelines, or legacy integrations. Current guidance suggests prioritising those exceptions early, because they are often the least documented and the easiest to overlook.

There are a few edge cases worth handling carefully. Temporary break-glass accounts should still be reviewed first if they are enabled broadly or lack strong logging, because “rarely used” does not mean “low risk.” Shared accounts deserve special attention when individual accountability is missing, since revoking access becomes more complex. Service accounts that no longer have a clear owner should be treated as high risk until proven otherwise.

There is no universal standard for exact ranking beyond risk, so most programmes use a simple order: privileged users, cross-environment automation, sensitive-data access, then routine business access. NHIMG’s 52 NHI Breaches Analysis is useful here because it shows how often overlooked identities become the first foothold in larger compromise chains.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• When should organizations review access controls?
• How should security teams run access reviews for non-human identities?
• How should security teams govern non-human identities that have persistent access?
• When do NHI access reviews create more value than a one-time cleanup?