The real risk isn’t one bad admin. It’s six months of “just this once.”

The loud kind: an admin account gets popped, alarms go off, everyone learns to spell “forensics” pretty damn quick.

And the quiet kind: a user account drifts from “needs read-only” to “somehow has admin”, a service key keeps living past its expiry date like a stubborn houseguest, and a “temporary” exception quietly becomes a permanent feature.

Most organizations aren’t breached by a single dramatic mistake. They’re breached by the slow accumulation of small, reasonable decisions, plus one bad actor who appreciates your lack of identity tracking and commitment to consistency.

That’s why tracking misconfigured accounts, over-privileged users, and unrotated keys over time is not “nice to have visibility”. It’s how you stop risk from compounding while everyone is busy shipping.

The Case for “Security Receipts” (and why snapshots don’t cut it)

If you do access reviews as a quarterly ritual, you already know the vibe: spreadsheet exports, awkward conversations, and a lot of “I think this is needed for… something?”

Meanwhile, attackers are not waiting for Q2.

Verizon’s 2025 DBIR continues to tell the same story in new ways: credential abuse remains a common entry point, and attackers prefer legitimate access over “hacking” in the Hollywood sense. For example, Verizon highlights that about 88% of breaches in the “Basic Web Application Attacks” pattern involved stolen credentials.  

Time-series identity tracking gives you what snapshots cannot:

• Drift detection: when access is creeping, not when it has already crept.
• Context for triage: whether today’s “weird” permission is new, or has been weird since April.
• Evidence you can actually defend: not “we think it’s OK,” but “here’s what changed, when, and why.”

Advantage #1: You catch privilege drift before it becomes your incident

Misconfigurations aren’t usually a single, large misstep. They are a dozen small ones: wrong group membership, a role that’s too broad, a conditional policy that doesn’t do what everyone thinks it does, or an exception created under pressure that never gets removed.

Tracking over time means you can:

• Spot “permission inflation” or access creep as it happens (especially after org changes, mergers and acquisitions, or platform migrations).
• Identify repeating sources of misconfig (a template, a team, a pipeline, a rushed onboarding process).
• Reduce the blast radius of compromised credentials because fewer identities quietly become “keys to the kingdom”.

And yes, misconfiguration is common enough that regulators talk about it in plain language. The UK’s ICO references Gartner cloud security research stating 36% of companies suffered a serious cloud security leak due to misconfiguration, and also notes the often-cited stat that 99% of firewall breaches are caused by misconfigurations.  

Those numbers aren’t there to scare us. They’re there because “we’ll do a review later” keeps not working.

Advantage #2: Over-privilege becomes measurable, fixable, and politically survivable

“Least privilege” is easy to agree with and surprisingly hard to implement when production is on fire, and someone needs access right now.

Over time, tracking turns least privilege into an operational control:

• You can quantify standing privilege: who has powerful access, for how long, and whether they used it.
• You can target remediation: focus on high-risk privileges, not every minor permission.
• You can shrink incident impact: compromised accounts do less damage if their privileges are tight and time-bound.

It also improves the tone of the conversation with engineering: instead of “security says no,” it becomes “security can say yes — briefly, safely, and with receipts.”

Advantage #3: Unrotated keys stop being an embarrassing mystery

Long-lived keys are the gift that keeps on giving… to attackers.

Google’s IAM guidance is blunt: rotate keys routinely because leaked keys are hard to eliminate completely, and key rotation reduces the risk from leakage.  

And if you want a stat that should make any CISO develop a twitch: GitGuardian reports that 70% of leaked secrets remain active two years later.  

Tracking keys over time lets you:

• Identify keys older than policy (e.g., 90 days) and prove enforcement.
• Spot “shadow key creation” (especially around service accounts and CI/CD).
• Triage leaks faster by knowing what’s old, what’s unused, and what’s still actively authenticating.

In other words, you move from “we found a key” to “we know exactly where it’s used, how risky it is, and how to rotate without breaking prod.”

Advantage #4: Faster incident response, because history gives you speed

When an alert hits — token theft, suspicious access, unusual API calls — your response time is limited by context.

Microsoft’s Digital Defense Report 2025 calls out token theft as a technique attackers use to gain access without needing a password.  

If you have time-series identity data, you can immediately answer:

• Did this identity recently gain new privileges?
• Is this key brand new (suspicious) or ancient (also suspicious)?
• Was this role used normally until yesterday, or has it never been used at all?

That translates directly into better containment decisions: revoke precisely, not broadly. Less panic. Less downtime. Less “we disabled half of engineering because vibes.”

Advantage #5: Compliance becomes evidence, not theatre

Auditors and assessors don’t really want your policy PDF. They want proof the policy is true in real systems.

Time-based tracking gives you:

• Continuous control evidence (“here’s the drift trend and the remediation trend”)
• Clear access justification trails (who approved what, when it expired, and whether it was used)
• Audit-ready reporting without a spreadsheet hostage situation

This is the difference between “we do least privilege” and “we can show least privilege”.

Where a Modern CIEM + JIT Workflow Fits (without making engineers hate you)

The practical way to do this at scale is to combine:

1. Entitlement visibility across AWS/Azure/GCP
2. Just-in-time access approvals that expire automatically
3. Recommendations to tighten access safely
4. Audit-grade reporting that shows change over time

One approach (and a sensible one) is a platform that pulls entitlements into a single audit-ready view, supports JIT access approvals from Slack or Microsoft Teams, uses AI recommendations to make least privilege practical, and provides fine-grained privileged activity analysis to understand what high-risk access is actually doing.  

That combination is the grown-up version of “least privilege”: not a lecture, but a workflow.

If you want to get started, ensure your cloud permissions are in order and meet compliance requirements by downloading our There are two kinds of identity problems..

The Punchline

Attackers are not out there admiring your policy library. They’re looking for accounts that drifted, privileges that stuck, and keys that never died.

Track identity risk over time, and you’re no longer guessing. You’re watching risk form in real time, and deleting it before it becomes a board slide.