Local approval, review, or remediation workflows that continue operating outside the central governance platform. They often appear when managers distrust the central review context or when applications were never fully onboarded. Parallel processes weaken consistency because the same access decision is governed in more than one place.
What Parallel Processes Are
Parallel processes are duplicate approval, review, or remediation workflows that operate outside the central governance system. They usually emerge when teams do not trust the primary review context, or when applications were never fully onboarded into the main control plane.
They are not a separate control objective, they are a sign that governance has split into two paths. The result is inconsistent decisions, uneven evidence quality, and a weaker ability to prove who approved what, when, and under which rules.
Why Parallel Processes Emerge
Parallel processes usually appear for practical reasons rather than malicious intent. A business unit may keep a local spreadsheet, inbox, or ticket queue because the central workflow is too slow, does not reflect local context, or lacks complete data. In other cases, the central process was introduced after legacy applications, so teams continued using the older path that still feels operationally easier.
This creates a control boundary problem: the same access decision can be handled in more than one place, with different reviewers, different timing, and different standards. Once that happens, the central process stops being the only source of truth, even if it remains the official one.
How Parallel Processes Weaken Governance
The main harm is inconsistency. One approval path may apply strict review and recertification, while the other uses informal judgment or local exceptions. That makes it harder to compare decisions across systems and harder to know whether similar access was treated similarly.
Parallel workflows also create coverage gaps. If a system is partially onboarded, some entitlements may flow through the central process while others are reviewed locally, which leaves blind spots in inventory, ownership, and attestation. Over time, those blind spots can become permanent exceptions rather than temporary workarounds.
Because the central platform no longer sees every decision, reporting and audit trails become fragmented. That matters most when organisations need to answer a simple question: is a given approval actually governed, or just locally tolerated?
What Parallel Processes Mean Operationally
For practitioners, parallel processes are usually a symptom of weak adoption, poor system onboarding, or a mismatch between governance design and real-world operating rhythm. They often indicate that the organisation has designed a central rule set without making it practical enough for the teams expected to use it.
The practical issue is not only duplication, but drift. Each local workaround can evolve into its own mini-policy, with different approvers, thresholds, and documentation expectations. Once that happens, remediation becomes harder because the organisation must reconcile process design, ownership, and cultural trust at the same time.
Risk and Threat Considerations
Parallel processes increase the chance that excessive or stale access slips through because review obligations are no longer enforced in one place. They also create an attractive path for abuse when users or administrators can route around slower central controls by choosing the easier local workflow.
Failure mechanism: Control fragmentation lets the same entitlement be approved, renewed, or remediated under different rules, which weakens traceability and makes bypass or exception creep more likely.
Impact: Organisations can end up with inconsistent access decisions, hidden exceptions, weaker audit evidence, and a higher likelihood of unreviewed or over-permissioned access persisting.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | GV.RM-01 — Risk Management Strategy | Parallel processes create governance and control drift that must be managed as enterprise risk. |
| GV.OC-01 — Organizational Context | Duplicate local workflows reflect unclear control ownership and operating context. | |
| PR.AA-05 — Identity Management, Authentication and Access Control | Parallel approval paths undermine consistent access control enforcement and review. | |
| Recommendation — Define ownership and escalation for shadow workflows and fold them into the formal risk register. Align local approval paths to the official governance model and assign a single accountable owner. Centralize access approval and review so every entitlement follows one governed workflow. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | AC-1 — Access Control Policy and Procedures | Parallel processes indicate access-control procedures are not being consistently applied. |
| AC-6 — Least Privilege | Duplicated review paths can allow excessive access to persist outside the intended control path. | |
| Recommendation — Document one authoritative access-control process and retire local approval variants. Use least-privilege reviews to eliminate exceptions that survive in local workflows. | ||
Practitioner Guidance
Governance implication: Treat parallel processes as a control-design problem, not just an operations nuisance. If teams are using local workflows, the central process is not fully meeting their needs, so ownership, evidence requirements, and onboarding coverage need to be aligned with actual operating practice.
What to watch for: Repeated local approvals, shadow spreadsheets, manual sign-off outside the primary platform, or exceptions that never get retired usually show that governance has splintered. Those are the places where control drift becomes routine.
Practitioner takeaway: A parallel process is most dangerous when everyone knows it exists but nobody treats it as a separate control. If it governs access decisions, it must be visible, owned, and reconciled back to the official workflow.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- Who is accountable when access governance relies on parallel local processes?
- How should organisations design compliance processes so data quality and governance reinforce each other instead of working in parallel silos?
- Why do traditional IAM and IGA processes miss AI governance gaps?
- When should organisations modernise PKI instead of keeping legacy processes?
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on October 6, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org