Security and endpoint operations should own the migration, with support from customer success or technical account teams where needed. The practical task is to recreate the old behaviour in new profiles, verify targeting and priority rules, and then phase changes through test devices before broad rollout. That avoids surprises when read-only migrated settings can no longer be edited.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Migration ownership matters because profile-based management changes how endpoint policy is expressed, targeted, and audited. If the work is treated as a simple console refactor, teams often preserve old deployment-group logic without checking how priority, inheritance, and read-only migrated settings actually behave. That creates drift between what administrators expect and what devices receive.
Security and endpoint operations are the right owners because they can validate the control intent, not just the tooling. Customer success or technical account teams can help with rollout sequencing, but they rarely have the operational context to resolve conflicting rules or unsafe exceptions. NHIMG’s Top 10 NHI Issues and the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Lifecycle Processes for Managing NHIs both reflect the same operational pattern: identity and control changes fail when ownership is split across teams that do not share one source of truth.
That is especially true when the migration intersects with baseline security policy, exception handling, or device targeting rules that must remain consistent during phased rollout. In practice, many security teams discover the ownership gap only after a profile has already been assigned broadly and the old deployment-group assumptions no longer match device behaviour.
How It Works in Practice
The practical model is a shared migration effort led by security and endpoint operations, with clearly bounded support from customer success or technical account teams. Security defines the desired control state, while endpoint operations translates that intent into profile structure, targeting logic, and rollout sequencing. The main task is not “copying settings”; it is recreating legacy behaviour in a new management model and proving that the profile hierarchy produces the same outcome under live conditions.
A disciplined migration usually follows four steps:
- Inventory legacy deployment groups, exclusions, and special cases.
- Map each old behavior to a profile, priority, or targeting rule.
- Test on a small device set to confirm read-only migrated settings do not create hidden conflicts.
- Expand gradually, with rollback criteria and clear change ownership.
This is consistent with guidance in the NHI Lifecycle Management Guide, which emphasizes lifecycle visibility and controlled change, and with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, where governance and change control should support measurable protection outcomes. If secrets, device identities, or service-like automation are involved, the same ownership discipline should align with the broader lifecycle expectations described in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Regulatory and Audit Perspectives.
The key control point is verification. Security should approve the policy intent, endpoint operations should confirm effective targeting, and both should sign off before broad rollout. These controls tend to break down in large hybrid estates with overlapping admin scopes because conflicting profile precedence and local exceptions make legacy behavior hard to reproduce cleanly.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter ownership often increases coordination overhead, requiring organisations to balance faster rollout against stronger change assurance. In smaller environments, one team may handle both security and endpoint operations, but the same separation of duties should still be preserved logically through review and approval gates.
Current guidance suggests that customer success or technical account teams should not own the migration, but they can be valuable for tenant-specific knowledge, feature constraints, or vendor escalation. That is a support role, not an accountability role. When a migration includes regulated endpoints, executive devices, or systems with strict uptime requirements, the rollout plan should include staged pilots, explicit exception handling, and a documented fallback path. NIST’s NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls remains a useful reference for change authorization and configuration management discipline.
There is no universal standard for this yet, but the safest pattern is to keep one accountable owner for policy correctness and one operational owner for deployment execution. In environments where profile migration is bundled with endpoint re-enrolment, MDM tenant changes, or OS upgrade work, the ownership model should be extended to include rollback authority and post-change validation. In practice, teams usually lose control when migration is driven by project timelines rather than by the people responsible for policy integrity and endpoint state.
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, NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 and NIST AI RMF set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | GV.OC-01 | Migration ownership must map to clear governance and control accountability. |
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | CM-2 | Baseline configuration control applies to migrating legacy deployment groups. |
| NIST AI RMF | AI RMF governance logic fits ownership, accountability, and operational oversight. | |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-08 | Identity and policy migrations can expose mis-scoped permissions and drift. |
Assign a named owner for profile migration governance and confirm change approvals before rollout.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- How should organizations prioritize environments for NHI management?
- What is the difference between attack surface management and NHI governance?
- What is the difference between role-based access and API key governance for NHI security?
- Who should own fraud controls for referrals, loyalty, and promotions?
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on August 27, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
