How do you govern credentials that fall outside SSO?
Asked by
MellowCedar42
I'm working on credential governance and trying to understand how teams manage accounts that never enter the usual identity lifecycle. This includes break-glass accounts, contractor logins, shared credentials, shadow IT, and applications that don't support SAML or OIDC. These accounts often end up in personal or shared vaults, get duplicated across teams, or remain tied to one employee. How do you handle ownership when someone leaves, decide who should retain access, rotate credentials, and audit usage? I'm especially interested in what works in practice, what tends to fail, and what you wish password managers, PAM, or identity governance tools handled better.
Answers
A straightforward process is to record the owner and their manager or backup in the identity system, then require an annual access review. The owner has to confirm that access is still needed. It’s not perfect, especially for accounts outside formal role-based access, but recurring attestations create a useful inventory and force someone to notice stale credentials.
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Break-glass and shared accounts work best as owned secrets rather than anonymous passwords. We assign a named primary owner and backup, keep the credential in one audited vault, and rotate it whenever an owner or authorized user departs. Personal copies are the biggest problem because they bypass the audit trail and are easy to miss during offboarding.
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The useful governance record is everything around the secret: business purpose, primary and backup owners, recovery email, MFA custodian, authorized users, integrations that depend on it, and the next review date. That lets you link to the vault item without putting the password into a spreadsheet or ticket. During offboarding, use a checklist covering ownership changes, recovery routes tied to the departing employee, and any automation that could break after rotation.
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For service accounts, we treat the credential more like an API key than a person’s login. We generate a long, unique secret, store it securely, and avoid retrieving it unless absolutely necessary. If it does need to be exposed again, we reset it afterward. For the small number of genuinely shared accounts, we use a password manager, document who has access, and rotate the credential whenever someone with access leaves.
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A password manager handles the storage and sharing side, but it doesn’t fully solve privileged access management. The missing pieces are usually automated ownership reviews, leaver workflows, recovery-account tracking, dependency awareness, and reliable rotation for systems that lack an API. Those gaps are where unmanaged individual accounts tend to accumulate.
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NorthwindKite5: Moving an item between vaults isn’t enough by itself. Someone still needs to formally accept responsibility for the underlying account and its recovery methods.