They create workarounds when controls are too slow, too rigid, or disconnected from operational reality. In practice, friction becomes a governance problem because the shadow process often becomes the real process. That is why teams need to measure where work is being redirected outside the intended control path.
Why This Matters for Security Teams
Workarounds are rarely a sign of “bad users.” They usually indicate that the control is slower than the work, harder than the task, or misaligned with how systems actually operate. When that happens, people route around policy to keep delivery moving, and the security team loses visibility into what is being approved, bypassed, or reused informally. NIST’s NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 treats governance as an operating discipline, not a paperwork exercise, which is the right lens for this problem.
This pattern matters even more when the workaround involves secrets, service accounts, or agentic tooling. NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Standards notes that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, which helps explain why rigid access processes often get bypassed instead of followed. In practice, many security teams encounter the real control only after the shadow process has already become the default operating model.
How It Works in Practice
Workarounds emerge where control design collides with operational pressure. A deployment pipeline may require repeated approvals, a service may need an API key before a secrets workflow is ready, or an administrator may need temporary elevation with no fast path to NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls style access governance. If the approved path is too slow, teams create a faster one, often outside ticketing, logging, or review.
In identity-heavy environments, the workaround is frequently about friction in credential handling. A common pattern is long-lived access that gets copied into code, chat, or a shared vault because the intended rotation or issuance flow is inconvenient. NHIMG’s Ultimate Guide to NHIs — Standards highlights that 96% of organisations store secrets outside secrets managers in vulnerable locations, which shows how often the exception becomes the norm. The practical lesson is to design for the actual task flow, not the ideal policy flow.
- Measure where approvals are delayed, repeated, or silently avoided.
- Shorten the path for low-risk actions and reserve hard controls for genuinely sensitive changes.
- Use logging and review to spot shadow processes, not just to confirm formal compliance.
- Align access, rotation, and escalation paths with the way admins and pipelines actually operate.
Current guidance suggests that the best control is often the one people will still use under pressure. These controls tend to break down when environments mix legacy admin practice, CI/CD automation, and third-party integrations because each context introduces a different approval and credential lifecycle.
Common Variations and Edge Cases
Tighter controls often increase delay and exception handling, so organisations have to balance assurance against throughput. That tradeoff is especially sharp in incident response, release engineering, and break-glass administration, where a strict rule can be safer on paper but operationally unusable in a real outage. In those cases, best practice is evolving toward risk-based paths rather than one universal workflow.
There is no universal standard for this yet, but the direction is clear: make exceptions explicit, time-bound, and observable. For AI-enabled workflows, this also intersects with model governance and tool access. If an agent can invoke actions or retrieve sensitive context, the workaround may become an unintended privilege path, which is why NIST’s NIST AI 600-1 GenAI Profile and related AI governance guidance matter alongside identity controls.
That is also why current guidance on security teams is to look for the organisational signal behind the workaround: repeated exemptions, manual credential handling, and “temporary” access that never expires. In practice, teams usually discover the issue after a breach review, an audit finding, or an outage forces someone to explain why the official process was bypassed.
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, NIST AI RMF and NIST AI 600-1 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | GV.OC-03 | Workarounds usually signal misaligned governance and operational priorities. |
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | AC-2 | Workarounds often appear when account lifecycle steps are too slow or rigid. |
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | Shadow credential handling is a core non-human identity governance failure mode. | |
| NIST AI RMF | GOVERN | Agentic or AI-assisted workflows need governance to prevent unsafe shortcut behaviour. |
| NIST AI 600-1 | GenAI workflows can create new bypass paths when controls slow delivery. |
Streamline account provisioning, review, and revocation so users do not create parallel access paths.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on July 10, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
