Zero Standing Privileges: The Future of Access Management

Introduction

The help desk at MGM Resorts had no idea they were about to enable one of the most devastating casino breaches in history. In September 2023, a group called Scattered Spider didn’t need sophisticated malware or zero-day exploits. They simply called the IT help desk, impersonated an employee using publicly available LinkedIn data, and convinced a well-meaning support agent to reset credentials and disable MFA. Within hours, they had super administrator privileges in MGM’s Okta and Azure environments. Standing privileges that gave them the keys to the kingdom.

The result? Over 100 ESXi servers encrypted, slot machines offline, check-in systems down, and room locks disabled. MGM’s operations ground to a halt for ten days. The financial damage exceeded $100 million. Caesars Entertainment fell to the same tactics weeks earlier and paid a $15 million ransom.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the attackers didn’t break anything. They walked through doors that were already open. Doors kept unlocked by standing privileges that never should have existed in the first place.

This is the problem Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) was built to solve. Not by adding more locks and keys, but by rethinking how we grant access in the first place. In a world where the average organization has 99% of its identities over-permissioned, where non-human identities outnumber humans 150:1, and where autonomous AI agents can accumulate privileges faster than humans can audit them, the traditional model of “grant once, revoke manually” isn’t just inefficient. It’s catastrophic.

By the end of this article, you’ll understand not only what Zero Standing Privilege is and why it represents the future of access management, but also how to implement it in your organization without breaking everything. Whether you’re a CISO evaluating next-generation PAM solutions, an identity architect designing Zero Trust frameworks, or a security engineer tired of cleaning up over-permissioned accounts, this guide will give you a practical roadmap to get started.

The casino attacks proved one thing: in 2026, standing privileges aren’t just a compliance problem. They’re an existential risk. Let’s explore how ZSP eliminates that risk at the source.

The Problem with Standing Privileges

To understand why Zero Standing Privilege matters, we need to confront an uncomfortable reality: traditional privileged access management is broken. Not poorly implemented. Broken by design. The entire model was conceived in an era of static data centers, predictable users, and manageable attack surfaces. That world is gone.

The Traditional PAM Model’s Fatal Flaws

Traditional Privileged Access Management operates on a simple premise: identify privileged accounts, lock them in a credential vault, require users to “check out” credentials when needed, and monitor their sessions. This worked reasonably well when your privileged users were a handful of DBAs and system administrators working 9-to-5 in an on-premises data center.

But that model has three fatal assumptions that no longer hold:

1. Privileges can be pre-defined and relatively static. In cloud-native environments, permissions are fragmented across AWS (12,000+ possible actions), Azure (8,000+ actions), and GCP (5,000+ actions). The old “DBA” or “sysadmin” role doesn’t map to this reality. What does a “Kubernetes admin” need access to? The answer changes based on the cluster, namespace, workload, and even time of day.

2. Humans are the primary consumers of privileged access. Wrong. In modern environments, non-human identities (service accounts, CI/CD pipelines, serverless functions, autonomous AI agents) outnumber human identities 150:1. Traditional PAM wasn’t designed for the reality of ephemeral compute, where a Lambda function might need S3 write permissions for 30 seconds before it ceases to exist.

3. Manual revocation is sufficient. This assumption creates the most dangerous gap: privilege drift. When you grant someone DBA access for a migration project, how do you ensure it gets revoked when the project ends? In practice, it doesn’t. Access accumulates. Studies show 94-96% of standing privileges go unused, creating an attack surface that exists purely because we forgot to clean it up.

Real Breach Examples: The Cost of Standing Privileges

Let’s look at how standing privileges enabled real attacks, turning minor security lapses into catastrophic breaches:

MGM Resorts & Caesars Entertainment (September 2023) Scattered Spider exploited standing privileges through social engineering. After tricking the help desk into resetting credentials, attackers gained standing administrator access to Okta and Azure. These weren’t temporary credentials scoped to a specific task. They were persistent, god-mode privileges. The attackers moved laterally across the network, implanted backdoors, and encrypted critical infrastructure. Caesars paid $15 million. MGM lost over $100 million and suffered ten days of operational disruption.

Key lesson: The standing privileges gave attackers time to explore, escalate, and deploy ransomware. If access had been just-in-time and auto-expired after each session, the breach would have required constant re-authentication, making lateral movement exponentially harder.

Change Healthcare Ransomware (February 2024) Attackers compromised a Citrix server that lacked MFA protection, used stolen credentials to create standing admin accounts, exfiltrated sensitive healthcare data, and deployed ransomware. The breach exploited the fact that once credentials were obtained, there was no time limit or scope restriction on what the attacker could do.

The $862K Insider Attack (2024) A contractor with standing access to password reset capabilities used those privileges to reset thousands of passwords across the organization, causing $862,000 in damage. Why did a contractor have persistent access to such a sensitive function? Because in the traditional PAM model, access is granted until someone remembers to revoke it.

CrowdStrike Outage (July 2024) While not a breach, the CrowdStrike incident highlighted a related problem: the need for “break-glass” accounts with standing privileges for emergency recovery. When millions of Windows devices crashed due to a faulty update, organizations had to rely on dormant, always-on privileged accounts to recover systems. The incident resulted in over $5 billion in losses and demonstrated that even well-intentioned standing privileges create risk.

Midnight Blizzard / APT29 (2024) Russian state-sponsored attackers used password spraying to compromise a high-privilege account at a U.S. technology firm. Once inside, they leveraged standing elevated privileges to exfiltrate emails and documents for seven weeks before detection. The persistent access gave them time to establish footholds across multiple systems.

Snowflake Breaches (May 2024 onward) While primarily a credential reuse and MFA failure, the Snowflake breaches affecting AT&T, Ticketmaster, and others demonstrated how standing access to data platforms (without time limits or scope restrictions) allows attackers to exfiltrate massive datasets once initial access is obtained.

The Attack Surface Created by Always-On Access

Standing privileges create three specific attack vectors:

1. The Time Window Problem Every minute that elevated access persists is a minute an attacker can exploit it. If an engineer checks out DBA credentials at 9 AM for a 10-minute task but the credentials don’t expire until 5 PM, that’s 480 minutes of unnecessary exposure. Multiply that across hundreds of users and thousands of privileged accounts, and you have an attack surface measured in privilege-hours. Time windows during which dormant but active credentials can be abused.

2. The Blast Radius Problem Standing privileges are rarely scoped to specific tasks. A “production database admin” role might include permissions to read, write, delete, backup, restore, and grant permissions to others. An attacker who compromises those credentials inherits the full blast radius of that role, even if the legitimate user only needed read access for a specific query.

3. The Audit Nightmare When privileges persist indefinitely, audit logs become meaningless. Did the user access that system because they needed to, or because they could? When did their legitimate need end and illegitimate access begin? With standing privileges, you can’t tell. Every access event looks the same. This makes forensics nearly impossible and allows attackers to hide in the noise.

Why JIT Alone Isn’t Enough

You might be thinking: “We already do Just-in-Time access. Doesn’t that solve the problem?”

Not quite.

Traditional JIT access often means “just-in-time provisioning of standing privileges.” Here’s how it typically works:

1. User requests DBA access
2. Manager approves
3. System provisions a static role to the user for 24-48 hours
4. User performs their task in 10 minutes
5. The role remains active for the rest of the time window

This is JIT Provisioning (JITP), not JIT Access (JITA). It’s better than permanent privileges, but it still creates interim standing access. A temporary privilege that persists beyond the moment of need.

True Zero Standing Privilege requires ephemeral access that exists only for the duration of a specific session or task, then disappears entirely. No cleanup required. No drift. No audit backlog. The privilege simply ceases to exist.

In the next section, we’ll explore what true Zero Standing Privilege looks like and how it differs from the half-measures that pass for JIT in many organizations today.

What is Zero Standing Privilege?

Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) is exactly what it sounds like: a model where no user, service account, or system possesses persistent elevated access by default. Every privilege is temporary, scoped to a specific task, granted just-in-time, and automatically revoked when no longer needed. It’s not a product or a single technology. It’s an operating model, a security posture, and increasingly, a mandate.

If traditional PAM is a hotel where everyone gets a keycard that works indefinitely until someone manually deactivates it, ZSP is a hotel where your keycard is created on-demand when you check in, works only for your room and only during your stay, and self-destructs when you check out. No leftover keys. No forgotten access. No wondering who still has credentials from last year’s migration project.

The Four Core Principles

ZSP rests on four foundational principles that work together to eliminate standing privileges:

1. Zero Access by Default Every identity (human, service account, CI/CD pipeline, or autonomous AI agent) starts with zero privileges. There are no “baseline roles” or “default permissions.” If you haven’t explicitly requested access for a specific task, you have none. This inverts the traditional model where users accumulate permissions over time. In ZSP, accumulation is architecturally impossible.

2. Just-in-Time Access (JIT) Privileges are provisioned only when needed. A developer needing to debug a production issue doesn’t get “production access” added to their account. They request access to a specific service for a specific task. The system validates the request, grants ephemeral credentials, and the developer performs their work. When they’re done (or when the timer expires) the credentials cease to exist. There’s nothing to revoke because the privilege was never “standing.”

3. Just-Enough Access (JEA) Privileges are scoped to the exact task. If you need to restart a service, you get permission to restart that service, not administrative access to the entire server. If you need to query a database table, you get read access to that table, not DBA rights to the whole database. This principle minimizes the blast radius of any compromise. An attacker who steals ephemeral credentials inherits only the narrow scope of what those credentials were authorized to do.

4. Automatic Revocation Privileges expire automatically without human intervention. There’s no manual cleanup, no quarterly access reviews where someone has to remember what Bob needed access to six months ago. The system grants access with a built-in expiration (typically measured in minutes or hours) and when that timer expires, the privilege is gone. Bob wants access again tomorrow? He requests it again, the policy engine re-evaluates, and new ephemeral credentials are issued.

How ZSP Differs from Traditional PAM, JIT, and Zero Trust

Let’s clarify how ZSP relates to other access management concepts, because the terminology often overlaps in confusing ways:

ZSP vs. Traditional PAM Traditional Privileged Access Management focuses on securing credentials. Locking them in vaults, rotating them periodically, monitoring their use. But it assumes those credentials and the privileges they represent will exist as standing access until manually revoked.

ZSP, by contrast, focuses on eliminating credentials altogether wherever possible. Instead of securing a standing “root” password, ZSP generates ephemeral credentials for a specific session, uses them, and discards them. The credential never persists long enough to be stolen, shared, or forgotten.

ZSP vs. JIT Provisioning (JITP) As we discussed earlier, many organizations claim to use “JIT access” but actually implement JIT Provisioning. Granting a static role or account temporarily. The role persists for hours or days even if the task takes minutes.

True ZSP requires JIT Access (JITA), where credentials are generated on-the-fly for a specific session and deleted immediately after. Think of JITP as reserving a rental car for the day even though you only need it for one errand. JITA is summoning an Uber for that specific trip. The car appears, takes you where you need to go, and disappears.

ZSP vs. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) Zero Trust is a broader architectural model built on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” It applies to network access, device trust, application authentication, and more.

ZSP is a specific implementation of Zero Trust principles applied to privileged access. Where Zero Trust says “don’t trust the network,” ZSP says “don’t trust standing privileges.” Where Zero Trust requires continuous verification of device health, ZSP requires continuous justification of why a privilege should exist. ZSP is Zero Trust for entitlements.

You can implement Zero Trust without full ZSP (though you’ll have gaps), and you can theoretically implement ZSP in a non-Zero Trust environment (though it would be odd). In practice, ZSP is most powerful as part of a comprehensive Zero Trust strategy.

Technical Architecture and Workflow

So how does ZSP actually work? Let’s walk through the architecture and workflow of a mature ZSP implementation:

Components:

1. Policy Engine: The brain of the system. Evaluates access requests against organizational policies, user context (device health, location, MFA status), resource sensitivity, and risk scores. Policies might say: “Developers can access production databases if they have active MFA, are requesting during business hours, and have manager approval.”

2. Request Manager: The interface where users request access. Could be a Slack bot, a web portal, an API call from an automation system, or integration with an ITSM tool like ServiceNow. The request specifies: what resource, what level of access, for what duration, and why.

3. Credential Factory: Generates ephemeral credentials (tokens, temporary roles, session-based permissions) dynamically. In cloud environments, this might integrate with AWS STS (Security Token Service), Azure Managed Identities, or GCP service account impersonation.

4. Enforcement Agents: Ensure that local systems honor the ephemeral credentials and prevent privilege escalation. In some architectures, these are lightweight agents running on target systems. In cloud-native environments, enforcement happens via identity providers and API gateways.

5. Audit and Analytics Engine: Logs every request, approval, credential generation, access event, and revocation. Provides real-time anomaly detection (why is this user requesting database access at 2 AM from a new country?) and feeds into security orchestration tools.

Workflow:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 1. Developer needs to restart production API service   │
└───────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┘
                    │
                    ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 2. Requests access via Slack: "/access prod-api        │
│    restart 30min - investigating latency spike"         │
└───────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┘
                    │
                    ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 3. Policy Engine evaluates:                            │
│    - User has active MFA? ✓                            │
│    - Request during business hours? ✓                   │
│    - Device health verified? ✓                          │
│    - Auto-approval policy for "restart" action? ✓       │
└───────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┘
                    │
                    ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 4. Credential Factory generates:                       │
│    - Ephemeral AWS IAM role session                     │
│    - Scoped to single service restart                   │
│    - Valid for 30 minutes                               │
│    - Session token: sts:AssumeRole...                   │
└───────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┘
                    │
                    ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 5. Developer receives temporary credentials             │
│    - Credentials injected into CLI environment          │
│    - Developer restarts service (takes 2 minutes)       │
│    - Investigates logs (10 minutes)                     │
└───────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────┘
                    │
                    ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 6. Automatic revocation:                               │
│    - After 30 minutes, session token expires            │
│    - No manual cleanup required                         │
│    - Full audit trail of access generated               │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Notice what didn’t happen: no one granted the developer a “production admin” role. No static credentials were stored. No manual revocation process. The privilege existed for exactly as long as it was needed, scoped to exactly what was required.

Key Guardrails and Design Patterns

Mature ZSP implementations incorporate several guardrails to prevent abuse while maintaining usability:

Time-based constraints: Access expires based on elapsed time (e.g., “30 minutes from issuance”) or absolute time (e.g., “until end of business day”). Critical is that expiration is automatic and system-enforced, not manual.

Context-aware policies: Access decisions factor in device posture, network location, time of day, and user behavior. A DBA requesting access from a coffee shop in a foreign country at 3 AM gets different treatment than the same DBA from the office network at 2 PM.

Break-glass procedures: True emergencies require special handling. ZSP systems include heavily audited “break-glass” mechanisms that grant broader access but trigger immediate alerts and post-incident reviews. The key difference: even break-glass access is time-bound and audited.

Approval workflows: Not all requests auto-approve. High-risk actions (delete production database, grant admin to others) trigger approval chains, often with dual-control requirements. But even approved access is ephemeral.

Non-human identity support: Service accounts, CI/CD pipelines, and autonomous AI agents get the same treatment as humans. A GitHub Actions workflow doesn’t get standing AWS credentials. It requests ephemeral credentials for each run via OIDC federation.

The Autonomous Agent Challenge

This brings us to perhaps the most important use case for ZSP in 2026: autonomous AI agents.

Traditional PAM assumes relatively static identities with predictable access patterns. But AI agents (whether customer service bots, autonomous deployment systems, or AI-driven security tools) operate at a scale and speed that makes traditional access management impossible.

Consider an autonomous AI agent managing cloud infrastructure. It might:

• Create and destroy resources dynamically
• Scale services based on demand
• Respond to security incidents
• Execute complex multi-step workflows across dozens of systems

If you give that agent standing privileges to perform all those tasks, the privilege drift accumulates faster than any human process can audit. Within days, the agent has accumulated god-mode permissions across your entire infrastructure.

ZSP solves this by granting the agent ephemeral permissions for each action, evaluated in real-time against policies. The agent requests S3 write access for a specific bucket? The system checks if that action aligns with the agent’s defined role, current task, and environmental constraints. Grant the permission for that specific operation. Revoke it immediately after.

This is not theoretical. The Britive and Cisco Duo partnership announced in February 2026 specifically addresses this use case, combining Duo’s authentication and device trust with Britive’s ZSP runtime enforcement for “agentic AI identities.” As the announcement noted, traditional models “completely fall apart with agents” because privilege drift happens faster than humans can track.

Zero Standing Privilege isn’t just about securing human access anymore. It’s about making autonomous systems possible in the first place.

The Business Case for Zero Standing Privilege

Security teams love talking about attack surfaces and blast radius. CFOs love talking about ROI. The good news? Zero Standing Privilege delivers both in measurable, concrete ways that make the business case practically sell itself.

Compliance Benefits: Auditors Will Love You

If you’ve ever suffered through a SOX, PCI-DSS, or SOC 2 audit, you know the pain of answering questions like:

• “Who has access to production databases?”
• “How do you ensure access is removed when employees change roles?”
• “Can you show me all privileged access in the last 90 days and the business justification for each?”

With traditional PAM, these questions require manual access reviews, spreadsheet archaeology, and a lot of “we granted that for a project in 2023 and probably should have revoked it.” With ZSP, the answer is simple: “No one has standing access. Here’s the audit log of all ephemeral access granted, why, and when it auto-expired.”

SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) Compliance SOX requires internal controls over financial reporting, including limiting who can access and modify financial systems. ZSP makes this trivial:

• No standing access to financial databases = no risk of unauthorized modifications lingering from old privileges
• Every access event is logged with business justification (who, what, why, when)
• Automatic revocation eliminates the “did we remember to remove their access?” question
• Clear separation of duties via scoped permissions (you can view but not modify, or modify but not approve)

PCI-DSS Compliance PCI-DSS Requirement 7 mandates restricting access to cardholder data by business need-to-know. The standard explicitly calls for least privilege. ZSP implements this at the architectural level:

• Payment system access is never standing (always just-in-time for specific tasks)
• Cardholder data environments (CDE) benefit from the “no default access” principle
• Quarterly access reviews become trivial: “We don’t have standing access to review”
• Automatic logs satisfy Requirement 10 (track and monitor all access)

SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria SOC 2 audits evaluate security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. ZSP directly supports several common controls:

• CC6.1 (Logical Access Controls): No persistent privileged accounts
• CC6.2 (Access Removal): Automatic revocation eliminates the manual offboarding gap
• CC6.3 (Least Privilege): Architecturally enforced via scoped permissions
• CC7.2 (Risk Mitigation): Dramatically reduced attack surface from zero standing privileges

One CISO implementing ZSP reported that their SOC 2 audit time dropped by 40% because auditors no longer needed to review access control matrices and offboarding processes. The architecture made inappropriate access impossible.

Risk Reduction: Quantifying the Attack Surface Shrinkage

Let’s put numbers to the security benefits:

94-96% reduction in attack surface: Multiple studies show that this percentage of standing privileges go unused. They exist purely because someone forgot to revoke them. ZSP eliminates this overnight. An organization with 500 privileged accounts, 96% of which are dormant at any given time, suddenly has a real-time attack surface of 20 active sessions instead of 500 persistent credentials.

50% faster incident response: When every access event is logged with context (who, what, why, when), forensic investigations become dramatically faster. You’re not sifting through months of “valid” access to find the malicious needle. You’re reviewing time-bounded, justified sessions.

80% smaller identity attack surface: A Fortune 50 company case study showed that deploying ZSP via modern privileged identity management reduced their overall identity attack surface by 80% compared to traditional IGA/PAM approaches. Why? Because 80% of their attack surface existed in the form of standing privileges that never should have existed.

Hours of manual work eliminated weekly: Organizations report eliminating hours of weekly effort previously spent on manual access reviews, cleanup of over-permissioned accounts, and remediation of unused privileges. Automation doesn’t just improve security. It frees your team for higher-value work.

99% of identities are over-permissioned: Industry research consistently shows this staggering number. ZSP inverts that by making precise permissioning the default. You can’t be over-permissioned if you only get exactly what you need, when you need it, for as long as you need it.

Real ROI Examples

The cost savings from ZSP show up in several areas:

1. Reduced IT Labor Costs

• Fewer helpdesk tickets: When users can self-service access requests via automation (e.g., Slack bot + auto-approval policies), IT isn’t fielding constant “I need access to X” tickets
• No manual access reviews: Traditional quarterly access reviews require hours of manager time reviewing spreadsheets of permissions they don’t understand. ZSP eliminates standing access to review.
• Faster provisioning: One organization reduced production database access provisioning from 72 hours to 5 seconds

2. Lower Software Costs

• Eliminated unused licenses: When privileges are ephemeral, you’re not paying for inactive SaaS seats or on-premises license tiers based on peak privileged user counts
• Reduced PAM infrastructure: Some legacy PAM solutions charge per managed account. ZSP reduces the number of standing accounts to near-zero.

3. Cyber Insurance Premium Reduction Insurance carriers increasingly ask about privileged access management during underwriting. Demonstrating ZSP implementation can result in premium reductions of 10-15% by proving reduced risk of privilege-based attacks (the leading cause of breaches).

4. Avoided Breach Costs This is the big one. The MGM breach cost over $100 million. Change Healthcare’s ransomware attack disrupted healthcare payments nationwide. Your organization might not be a casino, but what would 10 days of downtime cost you? What’s the price of a data breach involving customer PII?

A useful calculation: If your organization has a 1-in-10 annual chance of a privilege-based breach costing $5 million (conservative for mid-market), the expected annual cost is $500,000. If ZSP reduces that risk by even 50%, you’ve justified $250,000/year in ZSP implementation costs.

Case Study: Fortune 50 Company (SGNL) A Fortune 50 organization deployed modern Privileged Identity Management (PIM) with ZSP principles on AWS in 6 months (compared to multi-year traditional PAM/IGA rollouts they’d attempted before).

Results:

• 80% reduction in identity attack surface
• Full auditability of all privileged access
• Dynamic policy control without operational disruption
• Expanded to session revocation and Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR)
• No explicit dollar savings reported, but preventing a breach on the scale of MGM’s $100M loss is the real ROI

Case Study: Kubernetes Infrastructure Team (Apono) An organization managing Kubernetes infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP implemented ZSP for their cloud environments.

Results:

• 98% reduction in Kubernetes attack surface
• Production access in seconds instead of hours or days
• Weekly manual work eliminated (no more reviewing static IAM policies)
• Converted static IAM to ephemeral flows
• Addressed the 150:1 ratio of non-human to human identities

Operational Efficiency Gains

Beyond cost savings, ZSP improves day-to-day operations:

Faster onboarding: New employees don’t wait for IT to provision accounts and roles. They request access when they need it, policies auto-evaluate, and they’re productive immediately.

Cleaner offboarding: No risk of forgotten access when employees leave. There’s no standing access to forget. Their ability to request ephemeral access gets disabled, and any active sessions expire within hours.

Better developer experience: Developers aren’t waiting for tickets to be approved to debug production issues. They request time-bounded access via Slack or CLI, get ephemeral credentials, do their work, and the credentials auto-expire. No friction, no security debt.

Audit trail for free: Every access event is logged by default with business context. You’re not trying to retrofit compliance onto an access model that wasn’t built for it.

The Bottom Line

The business case for ZSP isn’t “spend money on security to maybe prevent a breach.” It’s:

1. Cut operational costs by eliminating manual access reviews and provisioning delays
2. Reduce insurance and compliance costs through demonstrable risk reduction
3. Avoid catastrophic breach costs by eliminating the standing privileges attackers exploit
4. Improve productivity by removing friction from legitimate access

For a mid-market organization spending $200K/year on traditional PAM, the ROI calculation might look like:

• $50K/year in reduced IT labor (access reviews, ticket volume)
• $30K/year in insurance premium reduction
• $500K expected value from avoided breaches (conservative)
• Total annual benefit: $580K

Even if ZSP implementation costs $300K in year one and $100K/year ongoing, you’re break-even in year one and cash-positive thereafter.

For a large enterprise, scale those numbers 10x.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to implement Zero Standing Privilege. It’s whether you can afford not to.

Implementation Guide: From Zero to ZSP

Reading about Zero Standing Privilege is one thing. Actually implementing it without breaking production is another. Let’s walk through a practical, phased approach that I’ve seen work in organizations ranging from 50-person startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.

The key insight: you don’t have to achieve perfect ZSP on day one. This is a maturity journey, not a binary switch. Start small, prove value, build confidence, and expand systematically.

The ZSP Maturity Model

Before diving into implementation phases, it helps to understand where you are and where you’re headed. Here’s a practical maturity model for ZSP:

Level 1 - Aware (Most organizations are here)

• You know standing privileges are a problem
• You have traditional PAM (credential vaulting, session monitoring)
• Quarterly access reviews are painful and incomplete
• Privilege drift is visible but unmanaged

Level 2 - Reactive

• You’ve implemented some JIT provisioning for high-risk systems
• Access is granted temporarily but still uses static roles
• Cleanup happens manually or via scheduled jobs
• Non-human identities still have standing access

Level 3 - Defined

• Majority of privileged access uses JIT provisioning
• Policies define approval workflows
• Some systems use true ephemeral credentials
• Basic auditing and monitoring in place

Level 4 - Managed

• Full ZSP for human identities across most systems
• Non-human identities (service accounts, CI/CD) use ephemeral credentials
• Automated policy enforcement with anomaly detection
• Standing privileges limited to true break-glass scenarios

Level 5 - Optimized

• Zero standing privileges across all systems (cloud, on-prem, SaaS)
• Autonomous AI agents governed by ZSP policies
• Continuous policy optimization via ML/AI
• Full integration with ITSM, SIEM, and SOAR platforms

Most organizations should target Level 4 within 12-18 months. Level 5 is aspirational and may not be achievable (or necessary) for on-premises legacy systems.

Phase 1: Inventory and Baseline (Weeks 1-4)

You can’t secure what you don’t know exists. Start with discovery.

Objectives:

• Identify all privileged accounts (human and non-human)
• Map which systems and resources they can access
• Document current access patterns and usage
• Identify high-risk, high-value systems to prioritize

Actions:

1. Run an automated discovery scan across your environment:

   • Cloud environments: Use native tools (AWS IAM Access Analyzer, Azure PIM, GCP Asset Inventory)
   • On-premises: Use PAM vendor discovery tools or scripts to enumerate Active Directory privileged groups, local admin accounts, database super-users
   • SaaS: Inventory admin roles across all SaaS platforms (Okta, Salesforce, GitHub, etc.)

2. Categorize privileged accounts into tiers:

   • Tier 0: Domain admins, cloud root accounts, hypervisor admins
   • Tier 1: Production database admins, Kubernetes cluster admins, privileged service accounts
   • Tier 2: Development environment admins, lower-risk privileged access
   • Break-glass: Emergency access accounts

3. Analyze usage patterns:

   • When was each privileged account last used?
   • How frequently is it used?
   • What actions does it typically perform?
   • Are there seasonal patterns (e.g., month-end financial close)?

4. Identify “low-hanging fruit”:

   • Accounts that haven’t been used in 90+ days (immediate revocation candidates)
   • Service accounts with hardcoded credentials (convert to ephemeral)
   • Development environments (low-risk pilot targets)

Example Discovery Output:

High-Risk Standing Privileges Inventory
========================================

Tier 0 (Critical - Immediate Action Required):
- AWS root account (last used: 18 months ago) → Disable
- Domain Admin group (12 members, 3 inactive) → Audit
- VMware vCenter root (shared password) → Rotate + JIT

Tier 1 (Production - Phase 2 Priority):
- Production PostgreSQL super-user (5 users) → JIT implementation
- Kubernetes cluster-admin (8 users) → Scope reduction
- Production S3 admin (3 service accounts) → Ephemeral credentials

Tier 2 (Development - Pilot Targets):
- Dev environment AWS accounts (20 users) → ZSP pilot
- Staging database admins (15 users) → JIT implementation

Deliverables:

• Complete inventory of privileged accounts and entitlements
• Risk classification of each account
• Baseline metrics (number of standing privileged accounts, last-used dates, privilege sprawl)
• Prioritized list of systems for ZSP implementation

Time investment: 2-4 weeks with 1-2 FTE (full-time security/identity engineers)

Phase 2: Policy Definition (Weeks 5-8)

Now that you know what you have, define the rules for what should happen.

Objectives:

• Define ZSP policies for different user types and access scenarios
• Establish approval workflows
• Document break-glass procedures
• Create communication and training plans

Actions:

1. Segment users into personas with different access patterns:

   • Tier 1 Engineers: Frequent production access for operational tasks (restarts, deploys, scaling)
   • Database Administrators: Infrequent but high-privilege database access
   • Security Team: Investigation and incident response access
   • Developers: Occasional production read access for debugging
   • External Auditors: Time-bounded read-only access during audit periods
   • Service Accounts: Continuous automated access for specific functions

2. Define policies for each persona following this template:

persona: tier1_engineer
description: "Production infrastructure engineers"
access_types:
  - resource: production_kubernetes
    actions: [get, describe, logs, port-forward]
    approval: auto
    duration: 2_hours
    conditions:
      - active_mfa: true
      - business_hours: true
      - device_compliant: true
    
  - resource: production_kubernetes  
    actions: [delete, scale, apply]
    approval: manager_required
    duration: 1_hour
    conditions:
      - active_mfa: true
      - dual_approval: true
    
  - resource: production_database
    actions: [read]
    approval: auto
    duration: 30_minutes
    conditions:
      - active_mfa: true
      - vpn_required: true

3. Define approval workflows:

   • Auto-approval: Low-risk, high-frequency actions (read access, logs, service restarts)
   • Manager approval: Medium-risk actions (write access, configuration changes)
   • Dual approval: High-risk actions (delete, grant privileges to others, production data exports)
   • Break-glass: Emergency access with immediate alerting and post-incident review

4. Document context-aware requirements:

   • Time-of-day restrictions (no production DB access at 3 AM without justification)
   • Location-based rules (foreign country access requires additional approval)
   • Device posture requirements (must be company-managed device with up-to-date OS)
   • MFA requirements (always for production, optional for dev)

5. Create exception handling procedures:

   • What happens when automated provisioning fails?
   • How do users request access during system outages?
   • What’s the break-glass process for true emergencies?

Deliverables:

• Policy document mapping personas to resources to actions to approval requirements
• Exception and break-glass procedures
• Communication plan for affected users
• Training materials

Time investment: 3-4 weeks with security, identity, and operations stakeholders

Phase 3: Pilot Rollout (Weeks 9-14)

Start small. Prove the model works. Learn from mistakes in a controlled environment.

Objectives:

• Implement ZSP for a small, low-risk user group and system
• Validate policies work as expected
• Identify integration gaps
• Build confidence and case studies for broader rollout

Recommended Pilot Targets:

• User group: 10-20 willing volunteers from your most technical team (DevOps, SRE)
• Systems: Development or staging environments, not production
• Access types: Common actions like SSH access, database queries, log viewing

Actions:

1. Select and deploy a ZSP tool (we’ll cover specific vendors in the next section):

   • Cloud-native: AWS IAM Access Analyzer + temporary role assumption
   • PAM vendor: CyberArk, BeyondTrust, Britive with JIT capabilities
   • Purpose-built: Apono, SGNL, Indent for policy-based ephemeral access

2. Implement for pilot systems:

# Example: AWS temporary credentials via assumed role
# Before ZSP: Engineer has standing admin credentials
# After ZSP: Engineer requests session via CLI

$ access request aws:prod-db:read --duration 1h --reason "Debug slow query"
✓ Request approved (auto-approved based on policy)
✓ Temporary credentials generated (expires in 60 minutes)
✓ Credentials injected into current shell session

$ aws rds describe-db-instances --region us-east-1
# [DB query output]

# After 60 minutes, credentials automatically expire
$ aws rds describe-db-instances --region us-east-1
# Error: ExpiredToken - Session has expired

3. Run for 2-4 weeks and collect feedback:

   • Are there false positives (legitimate requests denied)?
   • Are there false negatives (inappropriate requests auto-approved)?
   • What’s the user experience? Are developers frustrated or delighted?
   • Are there edge cases the policies didn’t account for?

4. Measure pilot metrics:

   • Number of access requests per day
   • Auto-approval rate vs. manual approval rate
   • Average time from request to access granted
   • Number of expired sessions that users didn’t manually revoke
   • User satisfaction score

5. Iterate on policies based on learnings

Common Pilot Issues and Solutions:

Deliverables:

• Working ZSP implementation for pilot systems
• Pilot metrics and feedback report
• Refined policies based on learnings
• Case study to share with broader organization

Time investment: 4-6 weeks with dedicated pilot support

Phase 4: Staged Expansion (Months 4-9)

You’ve proven the model works. Now scale it systematically.

Objectives:

• Expand ZSP to additional user groups and systems
• Prioritize high-risk, high-value systems
• Maintain operational stability during rollout
• Build organizational muscle memory

Expansion Strategy:

Month 4-5: Development & Staging Environments

• All non-production environments adopt ZSP
• Developers get comfortable with the model in low-stakes environments
• Iron out integrations and tooling issues

Month 6-7: Production Read-Only Access

• Implement ZSP for production log viewing, monitoring, troubleshooting
• Low risk (read-only) but high visibility
• Demonstrates value: “See? Production access doesn’t require standing credentials”

Month 8-9: Production Write Access

• Migrate production database admins, Kubernetes admins, infrastructure engineers
• This is the high-value target (where most breach risk lives)
• Expect more pushback; use pilot case studies and metrics to build support

System Prioritization Matrix:

Prioritize systems based on risk × feasibility:

Implementation Pattern for Each System:

1. Identify native JIT capabilities (e.g., AWS STS, Azure PIM, Kubernetes TokenRequest API)
2. Integrate with ZSP policy engine to automate requests and provisioning
3. Migrate users in cohorts (start with early adopters, then broader teams)
4. Monitor for issues and provide responsive support
5. Measure success via metrics (reduced standing privileges, faster access, fewer incidents)

Handling Pushback:

You will encounter resistance. Here’s how to address common objections:

“This will slow us down during incidents” → Show pilot data: “Incident responders got production access in 5 seconds vs. 72 hours before. Plus, we can create incident-specific policies that auto-approve with increased monitoring.”

“What if the ZSP system is down and we need emergency access?” → Break-glass procedures: “We maintain offline break-glass credentials in a physical safe, with dual custody. Every use triggers an immediate alert and post-incident review.”

“Our legacy system can’t support this” → Hybrid approach: “We’re starting with cloud and modern systems where ZSP is easiest. For legacy, we’ll use traditional PAM until we can migrate or retire those systems.”

Deliverables:

• ZSP implemented across development, staging, and production environments
• User training and documentation
• Success metrics showing reduced standing privileges and improved access times
• Lessons learned and policy refinements

Time investment: 6 months with dedicated team and organizational change management

Phase 5: Operationalize and Optimize (Ongoing)

ZSP isn’t “set and forget.” It requires continuous monitoring, policy tuning, and expansion to new systems.

Objectives:

• Maintain zero standing privilege posture
• Detect and remediate drift
• Optimize policies based on usage patterns
• Extend to emerging use cases (AI agents, new SaaS, etc.)

Ongoing Activities:

1. Weekly: Review access analytics

   • Which requests are getting denied that should be approved?
   • Which auto-approvals should require manual review?
   • Are there unusual access patterns (user requesting access to systems they’ve never touched)?

2. Monthly: Policy tuning

   • Adjust time limits based on actual usage (if average session is 10 minutes but policy allows 1 hour, tighten it)
   • Update approval workflows based on organizational changes
   • Add new systems as they’re deployed

3. Quarterly: Audit and compliance review

   • Generate reports for auditors showing zero standing privileges
   • Review break-glass account usage (should be rare or zero)
   • Assess progress toward full ZSP maturity

4. Annually: Architecture review

   • Evaluate new ZSP tools and capabilities
   • Assess whether current vendors still meet needs
   • Plan expansion to remaining legacy systems

Monitoring and Alerting:

Set up automated detection for ZSP violations:

• Alert if anyone creates a standing privileged account
• Alert on break-glass account usage
• Alert on unusual access patterns (e.g., access from new country)
• Dashboard showing: number of active ephemeral sessions, requests per day, auto-approval rate

Deliverables:

• Continuous monitoring and alerting
• Regular policy optimization
• Maintained ZSP posture across all systems
• Training for new hires and team members

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Pitfall 1: Boiling the ocean Trying to achieve perfect ZSP across all systems simultaneously → Solution: Start small, prove value, expand systematically. It’s okay if some legacy systems take years.

Pitfall 2: Policies too restrictive Making access so hard to get that users circumvent the system → Solution: Design policies with user experience in mind. Auto-approve low-risk actions. Make requesting access frictionless.

Pitfall 3: No break-glass plan What happens when the ZSP system itself fails? → Solution: Maintain offline break-glass credentials with physical controls and heavy auditing.

Pitfall 4: Forgetting non-human identities Focusing only on human users while service accounts have standing God-mode → Solution: Prioritize service account and CI/CD credential rotation early. Cloud-native workloads should use ephemeral credentials (AWS IAM Roles for Service Accounts, Azure Managed Identities, GCP Workload Identity).

Pitfall 5: Inadequate communication Surprising users with access changes without explanation → Solution: Invest in training, documentation, and change management. Explain the “why,” not just the “what.”

Quick Start Checklist

If you want to start this week, here’s a 30-day quick-start plan:

Week 1:

• Run discovery scan of privileged accounts
• Identify 1-2 low-risk pilot systems
• Select 10 pilot users

Week 2:

• Define basic policies for pilot systems
• Choose a ZSP tool and get trial access
• Set up integration with pilot systems

Week 3:

• Onboard pilot users with training
• Launch pilot with 24/7 support
• Monitor and iterate

Week 4:

• Collect pilot feedback
• Present results to leadership
• Plan Phase 2 expansion

In the next section, we’ll explore the vendor landscape to help you choose the right ZSP tools for your organization.

Vendor Landscape: Choosing Your ZSP Platform

You can’t Google “buy Zero Standing Privilege.” It’s not a single product. It’s a capability supported by a growing ecosystem of vendors. Some are established PAM giants adapting to the ZSP model. Others are purpose-built startups that treat ZSP as their founding principle. Let’s break down the landscape so you can make an informed choice.

The Four Categories of ZSP Vendors

1. Traditional PAM Evolved Legacy PAM vendors adding JIT and ephemeral access to their platforms. Strengths: mature, comprehensive, enterprise-ready. Weaknesses: can feel like retrofitting, complex to configure.

2. Cloud-Native ZSP Purpose-built for cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP), often with Kubernetes as a first-class citizen. Strengths: seamless cloud integration, modern architecture. Weaknesses: may not support on-premises or legacy systems.

3. Policy-Based Access Platforms Focus on centralizing policy decisions across all systems (cloud, SaaS, on-prem). Strengths: unified governance, extensible. Weaknesses: requires integration work, newer market category.

4. Native Cloud Provider Tools AWS IAM Access Analyzer, Azure PIM, GCP Asset Inventory. Strengths: free, native integration. Weaknesses: limited to single cloud, no cross-platform visibility.

Vendor Deep-Dives

Britive: The Cloud-First ZSP Specialist

Overview: Britive positions itself as the first platform designed from the ground up for Zero Standing Privilege, focusing on cloud-native environments and dynamic privilege management. Their February 2026 partnership with Cisco Duo represents a strategic push into “continuous Zero Trust” by combining authentication (Duo) with runtime privilege enforcement (Britive).

Strengths:

• Multi-cloud ZSP: Seamless integration with AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes for ephemeral privilege delivery
• Agentic AI support: Explicitly designed to handle autonomous AI agents, non-human identities, and high-velocity workloads (the “agents completely fall apart with traditional PAM” problem)
• API-first architecture: Agentless integrations that work well in serverless and containerized environments
• Policy-based automation: Define policies once, apply across clouds
• Time-bound sessions: Automatic privilege creation and deletion with no manual intervention

Cisco Duo Integration: The partnership layers Duo’s phishing-resistant MFA, device trust, and risk-based authentication before access requests, then Britive enforces just-in-time, scoped privileges during runtime. Think of it as: Duo answers “are you who you say you are?”, Britive answers “what should you be allowed to do right now?”

Use Cases:

• Organizations with significant AWS/Azure/GCP footprint
• DevOps teams managing Kubernetes at scale
• Companies deploying autonomous AI agents that need governed access
• Hybrid environments needing cross-cloud visibility

Considerations:

• Less mature for on-premises Windows/Active Directory environments
• Newer vendor (founded 2018) compared to CyberArk/BeyondTrust, so less enterprise case study history

Pricing: Contact sales (typical SaaS model based on number of cloud accounts/users)

CyberArk: The PAM Giant Embracing ZSP

Overview: CyberArk is the Gartner Magic Quadrant leader in PAM, known for comprehensive credential vaulting, session isolation, and AI-driven risk analytics. They’ve evolved their platform to support ZSP principles while maintaining their strength in traditional PAM.

Strengths:

• Enterprise proven: Deployed at Fortune 500 scale with decades of track record
• Comprehensive: Covers credentials, secrets, sessions, endpoints, DevOps, cloud, on-prem
• AI-powered analytics: Behavioral detection of anomalous privileged access
• Hybrid support: Strong in both cloud and on-premises environments
• Compliance templates: Pre-built configurations for SOX, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, etc.

ZSP Capabilities:

• CyberArk Secure Cloud Access: JIT privileged access to cloud environments
• Automated credential rotation: Reduces standing credentials for service accounts
• Session isolation: Short-lived, monitored sessions for privileged actions
• Integration with Identity Providers: Works with Okta, Azure AD, etc. for federated access

Use Cases:

• Large enterprises with complex hybrid environments
• Organizations needing comprehensive PAM + ZSP in one platform
• Regulated industries requiring mature compliance controls

Considerations:

• Can be complex to deploy and configure
• Higher cost than cloud-native alternatives
• ZSP feels more like an evolution of their platform than a core design principle

Pricing: Enterprise pricing, contact sales (generally premium-priced)

BeyondTrust: Endpoint Privilege + JIT

Overview: BeyondTrust focuses on endpoint privilege management and session security, with strong capabilities in monitoring, recording, and least-privilege enforcement across operating systems.

Strengths:

• Endpoint focus: Excellent for Windows, Linux, macOS privilege elevation
• Session recording and analytics: Real-time monitoring with tamper-proof audit trails
• RBAC and JIT elevation: Contextual privilege elevation for specific tasks
• Cross-platform: Works across cloud and on-prem endpoints

ZSP Capabilities:

• Just-in-Time privilege elevation: Users request elevated access for specific commands, auto-revoked after execution
• Application control: Limit which applications can run with elevated privileges
• Password vaulting and rotation: Reduce standing credentials

Use Cases:

• Organizations prioritizing endpoint security and privilege management
• Environments with significant Windows Active Directory footprint
• Companies needing detailed session recording for compliance

Considerations:

• Complex UI and deployment (noted in reviews)
• Integration challenges with SSO platforms
• Licensing model can get expensive with multiple product tiers

Pricing: Contact sales (per-endpoint or per-user licensing)

HashiCorp Boundary: Identity-Based Access for Modern Infrastructure

Overview: HashiCorp Boundary is an identity-based access solution for dynamic infrastructure, providing time-bound, least-privilege access to servers, databases, and services without VPNs or bastion hosts.

Strengths:

• Bastionless access: No jump hosts, no static firewall rules (access is identity-based)
• Time-bound credentials: Ephemeral sessions with automatic expiration
• Multi-cloud and hybrid: Works across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises infrastructure
• Integration with Vault: Combine with HashiCorp Vault for complete secrets + access management
• Session recording and auditing: Full visibility into privileged access

ZSP Capabilities:

• Dynamic credential brokering: Generates ephemeral credentials for each session
• Least-privilege by default: Users get access to specific resources, not entire networks
• Just-in-time access: Credentials issued only when needed, auto-revoked

Use Cases:

• Organizations already using HashiCorp tooling (Terraform, Vault, Nomad)
• DevOps teams needing dynamic, secure access to cloud resources
• Companies wanting to eliminate VPNs and bastion hosts

Considerations:

• Requires deployment and management (self-hosted or HCP)
• Best when paired with HashiCorp Vault (Boundary alone doesn’t cover full PAM)
• Learning curve for teams unfamiliar with HashiCorp ecosystem

Pricing:

• HCP Boundary Standard: $0.50 per session (50 free/month)
• HCP Boundary Plus: $0.90 per session
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Additional Vendors Worth Considering

SGNL: Policy-based access platform with strong ZSP support. The Fortune 50 case study mentioned earlier used SGNL to achieve 80% identity attack surface reduction. Focus on continuous authorization and modern PIM.

Apono: Purpose-built for cloud access management with emphasis on Kubernetes and ephemeral permissions. The vendor behind the 98% Kubernetes attack surface reduction case study.

Delinea (formerly Thycotic + Centrify): Traditional PAM vendor evolving toward ZSP with their “Zero Standing Privilege” branded solutions.

Okta Advanced Server Access: (Formerly ScaleFT) Provides ephemeral SSH/RDP access with certificate-based authentication, integrated with Okta identity platform.

Vendor Comparison Matrix

How to Choose the Right Vendor

Use this decision tree:

1. What’s your primary environment?

• Cloud-native (AWS/Azure/GCP) → Britive, Apono, or native cloud tools
• Hybrid cloud + on-prem → CyberArk, BeyondTrust
• Kubernetes-heavy → Apono, Boundary
• Windows/Active Directory → BeyondTrust, CyberArk

2. What’s your ZSP priority?

• Cloud infrastructure and AI agents → Britive (especially with Cisco Duo partnership)
• Comprehensive PAM + ZSP → CyberArk
• Endpoint privilege management → BeyondTrust
• Bastionless access for DevOps → HashiCorp Boundary
• Policy-driven governance → SGNL

3. What’s your team’s maturity?

• Experienced enterprise security team → CyberArk or BeyondTrust (handle complexity)
• Cloud-native DevOps team → Britive, Apono, or Boundary (modern tooling)
• Small/mid-market → Start with native cloud provider tools (AWS IAM, Azure PIM) + simple add-on

4. What’s your budget?

• Enterprise budget → CyberArk (comprehensive but expensive)
• Mid-market → Britive, BeyondTrust, SGNL
• Budget-conscious → HashiCorp Boundary, native cloud tools

Implementation Tip: Start with Native Cloud Tools

If you’re unsure where to start and have a cloud-heavy environment, begin with native cloud provider capabilities:

• AWS: IAM Access Analyzer, temporary credentials via STS, IAM Roles Anywhere
• Azure: Privileged Identity Management (PIM), Managed Identities
• GCP: Just-in-Time Access, Workload Identity Federation

These are free, well-documented, and prove the ZSP model before you invest in third-party tooling. Once you outgrow them (need cross-cloud visibility, advanced policies, or support for non-cloud systems), migrate to a dedicated platform.

The Britive + Cisco Duo Partnership: A Closer Look

Given the recency and strategic importance of this partnership (announced February 2026), it’s worth understanding what makes it significant:

The Problem It Solves: Traditional Zero Trust focuses on authentication (prove who you are) but often ignores runtime privilege management (what should you be allowed to do right now, given current context and risk).

The Integration:

1. Duo handles authentication: User attempts to access Britive → Duo enforces MFA, device trust, risk-based policies
2. Britive handles authorization: Once authenticated, Britive evaluates what ephemeral privileges to grant based on requested resource, user context, policies
3. Continuous verification: Throughout the session, both platforms monitor for anomalies (device posture change, location change, privilege escalation attempts)

Why It Matters: This represents a convergence of Identity Security (Duo) and Privilege Security (Britive). Bridging the gap between “who you are” and “what you can do.” It’s especially important for autonomous AI agents, where traditional “authenticate once, trust forever” breaks down.

Competitive Positioning: This partnership positions Britive + Duo as an alternative to trying to build ZSP capabilities into existing Okta or Azure AD deployments. It’s “best-of-breed” identity + privilege vs. “single-vendor platform.”

In the next section, we’ll tackle the objections you’ll inevitably hear when proposing ZSP to your organization.

Objections and Responses: Winning the ZSP Argument

You’re convinced. You’ve read this far, you understand the business case, you know which vendor you want to pilot. Now you have to convince your CISO, CIO, VP of Engineering, and the database team that’s been doing things the same way for 15 years.

Here are the objections you’ll face and how to address them with data, empathy, and practical solutions.

Objection 1: “Our users will hate this. It adds friction.”

The concern: “We’re already asking our engineers to deal with MFA, VPNs, and a dozen security tools. Now you want to make them request access every time they need to do their job? They’ll revolt.”

The response:

“I get it. We’ve all been on the receiving end of security theater that makes our jobs harder without making us safer. But here’s the thing: well-implemented ZSP actually reduces friction for legitimate users.

Let me show you the data from our pilot. Before ZSP, when a developer needed production database access, here’s what happened:

1. Submit ticket to IT
2. Wait 24-72 hours for approval
3. IT manually provisions static credentials
4. Developer uses access for 10 minutes
5. IT forgets to revoke access
6. Access review 6 months later: ‘Does Bob still need this?’ (Nobody knows)

With ZSP:

1. Developer types /access prod-db read 1h debugging slow query
2. System auto-approves based on policy (3 seconds)
3. Ephemeral credentials delivered to their terminal
4. Developer completes work (10 minutes)
5. Credentials auto-expire (no manual cleanup)

Average time to access: 72 hours → 5 seconds.

Now, if your concern is about the request step itself (having to explicitly ask for access instead of just having it) that’s actually a feature, not a bug. It creates mindfulness. When you have to say ‘I need production database access to debug this query,’ you think twice about whether you really need production or if staging would work. Security through consciousness.

Plus, we’re not asking users to file tickets or navigate complex portals. It’s a Slack command, a CLI tool, or a browser extension. The best ZSP implementations are invisible until you need them.”

Follow-up objection: “But what about during incidents? We can’t wait for approvals when the site is down.”

Response:

“Absolutely. That’s why we have incident-specific policies that auto-approve access for on-call engineers during active incidents, with heightened monitoring. You get immediate access, we get immediate visibility. Win-win.”

Objection 2: “This is too complex for our team to manage.”

The concern: “We’re a small security team. We barely keep up with patching and basic PAM. You want us to implement this cutting-edge zero-privilege model? We don’t have the resources.”

The response:

“Here’s the irony: ZSP is actually simpler than what you’re doing now.

Right now, you’re managing:

• Quarterly access reviews (manually reconciling spreadsheets of who has what)
• Credential rotation policies (do we rotate every 90 days? 180 days?)
• Manual provisioning and deprovisioning workflows
• Cleaning up accounts when people leave or change roles
• Investigating ‘why does this person still have this access?’

With ZSP, most of that goes away. There’s no standing access to review. There’s no credential rotation because credentials don’t persist. Deprovisioning is automatic. Offboarding is trivial (disable their ability to request access, done).

Yes, there’s an up-front investment in defining policies and integrating tools. But once it’s in place, the operational burden drops dramatically.

Think about it this way: managing traditional PAM is like manually backing up your computer every day. ZSP is like setting up Time Machine and letting it handle backups automatically. More work up front, way less ongoing maintenance.

Also, you don’t have to do this alone. Most ZSP vendors provide:

• Implementation services and consulting
• Pre-built policy templates for common scenarios
• Integrations with your existing tools (IdP, SIEM, ITSM)
• Ongoing support and training

Start with a small pilot. Prove it works. Then expand systematically. You’re not expected to achieve perfect ZSP across your entire enterprise in one quarter.”

Objection 3: “We already have PAM. Why do we need this?”

The concern: “We’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in CyberArk/BeyondTrust/Delinea. We have credential vaulting, session monitoring, and MFA. Isn’t that enough?”

The response:

“Your traditional PAM is great at securing standing privileges. But the fundamental problem is that standing privileges shouldn’t exist in the first place.

It’s like having the world’s best safe to store money in your house. You’ve got biometric locks, cameras, alarms (excellent safe). But here’s the question: why is the money in your house instead of the bank?

Traditional PAM is the secure safe. ZSP is moving the money to the bank (or better yet, only withdrawing it when you actually need it).

Here’s the gap traditional PAM doesn’t close:

• Privilege drift: You grant access, it persists until someone remembers to revoke it. PAM doesn’t prevent drift; it just monitors the drifted access.
• Blast radius: When someone checks out ‘DBA credentials’ from the vault, they get full DBA powers. No scoping. No task-specific limits.
• Credential exposure window: Even vaulted credentials have to be used. Once checked out, they’re vulnerable to theft, sharing, or misuse until manually checked back in.

ZSP doesn’t replace PAM. It evolves it. Many organizations keep their PAM platform and add ZSP capabilities on top:

• Use the PAM vault for break-glass credentials
• Use PAM session recording alongside ZSP ephemeral access
• Use PAM for legacy systems that can’t support ZSP yet

Think of it as PAM 2.0. You’re not throwing away your investment; you’re upgrading it to meet modern threats.

Also, consider this: MGM and Caesars had PAM in place. It didn’t stop the attacks because the attackers got standing admin credentials. PAM secured the vault, but it couldn’t prevent the standing privileges from being misused once obtained.”

Objection 4: “Our legacy systems don’t support this.”

The concern: “We have 20-year-old applications running on Windows Server 2012, Oracle databases from the 2000s, and mainframes. They don’t support ’ephemeral tokens’ or ‘just-in-time access.’ What are we supposed to do?”

The response:

“You’re absolutely right. Not every system can support ZSP in its purest form. And that’s okay.

ZSP is a maturity journey, not a binary state. Here’s the pragmatic approach:

Tier 1: Cloud-native and modern systems (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, modern SaaS) → Implement full ZSP with ephemeral credentials and just-in-time provisioning

Tier 2: Legacy systems with some API/automation support → Implement JIT provisioning of temporary static accounts (JITP). Not perfect, but better than permanent standing access. Use your PAM to secure these accounts.

Tier 3: Ancient legacy systems with no automation → Keep traditional PAM for now. Focus ZSP efforts on Tier 1 and Tier 2. Plan migration or retirement of these systems.

The goal isn’t ‘ZSP everywhere overnight.’ The goal is reducing your attack surface wherever possible.

If you can eliminate 80% of standing privileges by implementing ZSP for cloud and modern systems, you’ve massively reduced risk (even if that mainframe still has a shared root password in a vault).

Also, ’legacy system’ doesn’t mean ‘permanent exception.’ Part of your ZSP roadmap should include legacy modernization or wrapping legacy systems with modern access controls. For example, you can put an identity-aware proxy in front of that old Windows app so that users authenticate with modern tokens even if the backend still uses static credentials.”

Follow-up: “So we’re going to have two different access models? That sounds confusing.”

Response:

“Temporarily, yes. But here’s the thing: you already have multiple access models. You probably have different processes for cloud vs. on-prem, different tools for Windows vs. Linux, different workflows for developers vs. third-party contractors.

ZSP doesn’t add complexity. It consolidates access under a unified policy framework, even if the underlying implementation varies by system type.

From the user’s perspective, it’s simple: ‘I request access, the system decides if I can have it, I get ephemeral credentials, they expire.’ Whether those credentials are AWS STS tokens or temporary Active Directory group memberships is abstracted away.”

Objection 5: “This sounds expensive.”

The concern: “We’re already over budget. You want to buy another security tool and spend months implementing it? Not happening.”

The response:

“Let’s talk numbers.

What ZSP costs:

• Vendor platform: $50K-$300K/year depending on size and vendor
• Implementation services: $50K-$150K one-time
• Internal engineering time: 2-3 FTE over 6-12 months
• Training and change management: $20K-$50K

Total year-one cost (mid-market): ~$250K-$500K

What ZSP saves:

• Reduced IT labor (access reviews, provisioning, cleanup): $50K-$100K/year
• Avoided breach cost (even 1% reduction on $10M expected breach cost): $100K/year expected value
• Cyber insurance premium reduction (10-15%): $20K-$50K/year
• Faster access provisioning (developer productivity): $50K-$150K/year
• Eliminated unused SaaS licenses: $10K-$30K/year

Total ongoing benefit: $230K-$430K/year

You’re break-even or cash-positive by year two, and that’s assuming you don’t prevent a single breach. If ZSP prevents or limits even one significant incident, the ROI is an order of magnitude higher.

Also consider: what’s the cost of NOT doing this?

• MGM lost over $100 million due to standing privilege exploitation
• Your cyber insurance carrier might require ZSP or similar controls for renewal
• Regulatory penalties for breaches involving over-permissioned accounts are increasing

Finally, you can start small. Pilot with native cloud provider tools (AWS IAM, Azure PIM) which are free. Prove the value. Then invest in a platform when you’re ready to scale.”

Objection 6: “We’re not a target. Our security is fine.”

The concern: “We’re not MGM or a bank. Attackers aren’t interested in us. We have basic security controls in place. This feels like overkill.”

The response:

“I wish that were true. But the data says otherwise.

10,626 breaches were reported in 2024 (a record). These aren’t just casinos and Fortune 500 companies. They’re small businesses, healthcare providers, local governments, SaaS startups. The common denominator? Privilege-based attacks.

Attackers don’t need to target you specifically. They use automated tools to scan for vulnerabilities, spray passwords, exploit misconfigurations. When they find standing privileges (whether at MGM or a 50-person SaaS company) they exploit them the same way.

Also, ‘we’re not a target’ is dangerous thinking because:

1. Supply chain attacks: Even if attackers don’t care about your data, they care about your customers. Compromise your SaaS platform to reach your enterprise customers.
2. Ransomware is opportunistic: Attackers don’t discriminate. If they can encrypt your systems and demand payment, they will.
3. Compliance is tightening: Even if you avoid breaches, auditors and customers are asking about ZSP. ‘Our security is fine’ won’t cut it when a customer security questionnaire asks about Zero Trust and privileged access controls.

Here’s a thought experiment: If an attacker got DBA credentials to your production database right now, how much damage could they do? If the answer is ‘a lot,’ then you have standing privileges that create risk. ZSP reduces that risk to near-zero.

You don’t need to be paranoid. But you should be realistically prepared. And ZSP is increasingly table stakes, not cutting-edge overkill.”

The bottom line on objections:

Every objection is valid and comes from a real concern (user experience, complexity, cost, legacy systems). The key to winning the argument is to:

1. Empathize with the concern (don’t dismiss it)
2. Reframe the problem (show how ZSP actually solves it)
3. Provide evidence (pilot data, case studies, industry trends)
4. Offer pragmatic paths (you don’t need perfection; start small and iterate)

Most organizations that resist ZSP today will adopt it within 2-3 years (either proactively or after an incident forces their hand). The question is whether you lead the change or react to it.

The Future of Zero Standing Privilege

We’ve covered what ZSP is, why it matters, and how to implement it. Now let’s look ahead: where is this going, and how should you prepare?

AI-Driven Access Decisions: The Next Evolution

Today’s ZSP implementations rely on policy-based automation. You define rules: “Developers can access production databases for read-only queries if they have active MFA and are on the corporate network.” The system evaluates requests against those rules.

But policies are static. They can’t account for every edge case, they require manual tuning, and they struggle with complex contextual decisions like: “Should this user get access given their recent behavior, the current threat landscape, and the sensitivity of the resource?”

Enter AI-driven access decisions.

By 2027, expect to see ZSP platforms leveraging machine learning to:

1. Predict access needs before they’re requested “Based on this engineer’s past behavior and the current on-call rotation, they’ll likely need production access in the next hour. Pre-approve their request to reduce latency.”

2. Detect anomalous access patterns in real-time “This user has never requested database access before, and they’re requesting it at 2 AM from a coffee shop in a foreign country. Auto-deny and alert SOC.”

3. Dynamically adjust privilege scopes “This user requested full read access to the database, but based on their task history, they likely only need access to three specific tables. Auto-scope the permission to reduce blast radius.”

4. Provide explanations for decisions “Access denied because: (1) user’s device is non-compliant, (2) resource is flagged as high-sensitivity, (3) request is outside normal working hours. Recommended action: submit request from compliant device or request manager approval.”

The vision: ZSP systems that learn and adapt, reducing the burden on security teams to manually define and update policies while improving both security and user experience.

Example: Britive + Cisco Duo’s AI roadmap The February 2026 partnership announcement explicitly mentioned future AI-driven capabilities, including behavioral analytics for autonomous agents and adaptive policy recommendations based on observed access patterns.

Convergence with Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) and ZTNA

Zero Standing Privilege is part of Zero Trust, but historically they’ve been implemented separately:

• ZTA/ZTNA focuses on network access, device trust, application authentication
• ZSP focuses on privileged entitlements and runtime authorization

Over the next few years, expect these to converge into unified platforms where:

• Your identity provider (Okta, Azure AD) integrates tightly with your ZSP platform
• Network access decisions (ZTNA) factor in privilege context (“you can reach this server, but only with read-only access”)
• Device posture (ZTNA) becomes a real-time input to ZSP policies (“your laptop’s OS is out of date, so you can’t get admin access until you patch”)

The goal: continuous authorization across the entire access chain (from network to application to entitlement) with no standing trust at any layer.

Gartner’s 2026 prediction aligns with this: “Organizations will enforce just-in-time, just-enough access to eliminate standing privileges and over-permissive models for both human and machine identities as a core element of zero trust maturity.”

The Autonomous Agent Governance Problem

We touched on this earlier, but it’s worth emphasizing: the proliferation of autonomous AI agents will make ZSP mandatory, not optional.

Consider the trajectory:

• 2023-2024: AI agents are experimental (ChatGPT plugins, simple automation)
• 2025-2026: AI agents become operational (customer service bots, DevOps automation, security tools that auto-remediate)
• 2027-2030: AI agents are ubiquitous (autonomous deployment pipelines, self-healing infrastructure, AI-driven business processes)

Each of these agents needs access to systems, data, and APIs. If you give them standing privileges, the privilege drift problem becomes exponential. An autonomous agent that creates cloud resources, modifies databases, and deploys code will accumulate god-mode permissions across your entire stack in days.

The only sustainable model is ephemeral, task-scoped permissions governed by real-time policies. This is ZSP applied to machine identities at scale.

What to expect:

• Agentic identity standards: Industry standards for how AI agents authenticate, request access, and prove their intended actions
• Policy frameworks for agents: Guardrails like “this deployment agent can create resources but not delete them” or “this data agent can read customer data but not export it”
• Real-time auditing: Every action an agent takes is logged with context (why it requested access, what policy approved it, what it did with the privilege)

The Britive/Duo partnership is an early indicator of where this is headed. Vendors are building “agentic AI identity” capabilities specifically because traditional PAM can’t handle it.

Predictions for 2026-2027

Here’s what I expect to see in the ZSP landscape over the next 18 months:

1. ZSP becomes a standard vendor RFP requirement Just as “MFA support” and “encryption at rest” became checkboxes in security vendor evaluations, expect “Zero Standing Privilege support” to become a standard question in PAM, identity, and cloud security RFPs.

2. Cyber insurance carriers mandate ZSP for coverage Insurance underwriters are already asking about privileged access controls. By 2027, expect explicit requirements: “To qualify for coverage, you must demonstrate no standing administrative access to production systems.”

3. Major cloud providers enhance native ZSP capabilities AWS, Azure, and GCP will continue improving their built-in ZSP tools (IAM Access Analyzer, PIM, Access Context Manager) to reduce dependence on third-party vendors for basic use cases.

4. Traditional PAM vendors acquire ZSP startups Expect M&A activity as legacy PAM vendors (CyberArk, BeyondTrust, Delinea) acquire cloud-native ZSP platforms to fill capability gaps. (Or vice-versa: ZSP startups acquire PAM vendors to expand enterprise coverage.)

5. ZSP extends to data access, not just infrastructure Current ZSP focuses on privileged accounts (admins, DBAs, cloud roles). Next frontier: data-level ZSP. Ephemeral access to specific datasets, tables, or files rather than entire databases or storage buckets. Think “I need read access to customer records for accounts in California created in the last 30 days” rather than “I need read access to the customer database.”

6. “Secretless” architectures become the norm For cloud-native applications, the concept of long-lived secrets (API keys, passwords, tokens) will increasingly be seen as legacy. Workload identity federation, ephemeral credentials, and certificate-based authentication will replace static secrets entirely.

7. Compliance frameworks explicitly reference ZSP Future versions of PCI-DSS, SOX guidance, and SOC 2 frameworks will explicitly call out Zero Standing Privilege as a best practice or requirement, making it harder for organizations to justify standing privileges.

How to Prepare for the Future

If you’re implementing ZSP today, here’s how to future-proof your architecture:

1. Design for extensibility Choose platforms with strong APIs and integration capabilities. You’ll want to integrate with future tools (AI analytics, ITSM, SIEM, data governance) that don’t exist yet.

2. Prioritize cloud-native systems Cloud platforms evolve faster than on-prem. Focus ZSP efforts on cloud and containerized workloads, where ephemeral access is architecturally natural.

3. Invest in policy-as-code Define your access policies in version-controlled code (not just UI configurations). This makes policies auditable, testable, and portable across tools.

4. Build organizational muscle memory The hardest part of ZSP isn’t the technology. It’s the cultural shift. Invest in training, documentation, and evangelism so that “request ephemeral access” becomes second nature.

5. Plan for AI agent governance If you’re deploying or considering autonomous agents (DevOps automation, AI-driven workflows), build ZSP into their architecture from day one. Don’t let them accumulate standing privileges.

6. Monitor the vendor landscape This is a fast-moving space. New vendors, new capabilities, and new integrations emerge quarterly. Revisit your vendor selection annually to ensure you’re not missing major innovations.

The Long-Term Vision: Privilege as a Service

Here’s where I think this ultimately goes:

In 10 years, the idea of “granting someone a privileged account” will seem as archaic as “giving someone the root password to all servers” seems today.

Instead, privilege will be a just-in-time service:

• You request access to a specific resource for a specific task
• The system evaluates your identity, device, context, and intent
• You receive a time-bounded, scoped credential (or direct action authorization)
• You perform your task
• The privilege ceases to exist

No accounts to manage. No credentials to rotate. No access to review. Just continuous, context-aware authorization for every action.

This isn’t science fiction. The technology exists today. The missing piece is adoption at scale. Organizational willingness to rethink access management from first principles.

The organizations that embrace this model now will be the ones defining best practices in 2030. The ones that wait will be playing catch-up after the next MGM-scale breach forces their hand.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

Let’s bring this home.

Zero Standing Privilege isn’t just a security buzzword or a vendor marketing term. It’s a fundamental rethinking of how we grant access in a world where the old assumptions no longer hold.

The traditional model (grant privileges, hope they get revoked, audit periodically, clean up the mess) made sense when we had 50 employees, 10 servers, and 5 privileged accounts. It doesn’t make sense when we have 500 employees, 5,000 cloud resources, 150,000 service accounts, and autonomous AI agents creating infrastructure on the fly.

The Three Key Takeaways

1. Standing privileges are an existential risk, not just a compliance problem. MGM’s $100 million loss, Caesars’ $15 million ransom, Change Healthcare’s operational disruption. These weren’t sophisticated zero-day exploits. They were attackers walking through doors left open by standing administrative access. Your organization has those same doors. ZSP closes them.

2. ZSP is achievable, not aspirational. This isn’t a five-year moonshot. Organizations are implementing ZSP today, seeing measurable results in months (98% attack surface reduction, 80% smaller identity footprint, 50% faster incident response). You don’t need to be a Fortune 50 company with unlimited budget. You need a phased plan, the right tools, and organizational commitment.

3. The future is ephemeral. Whether it’s human access, service accounts, or autonomous AI agents, the direction is clear: privileges that exist only when needed, scoped to exact requirements, and automatically revoked. The question isn’t whether your organization will adopt this model. It’s whether you’ll lead the transition or be dragged into it by an incident or compliance mandate.

Your Next Steps

If you’ve read this far, you’re not looking for permission. You’re looking for a starting point. Here’s what to do this week:

Day 1: Discovery Run an automated scan of your privileged accounts. How many exist? When were they last used? What’s the blast radius? You can’t fix what you don’t measure.

Day 2-3: Education Share this article (or a summary) with your CISO, identity team, and key stakeholders. Get alignment on the problem before proposing solutions.

Day 4: Vendor research Book demos with 2-3 ZSP vendors (Britive, CyberArk, Apono, or native cloud tools). See what modern privilege management looks like.

Day 5: Pilot plan Draft a 30-day pilot proposal. Identify a low-risk system (dev environment, small user group), define success metrics, and estimate resources. One page. Get it approved.

Week 2: Launch pilot Start small. Prove the model works. Gather data. Iterate.

Month 2: Expand Use pilot results to justify broader rollout. Build momentum.

The hardest part isn’t the technology. It’s overcoming inertia. The “this is how we’ve always done it” mindset that keeps standing privileges in place because they’re familiar.

A Final Thought

Security is often framed as a trade-off: more security means less usability, slower operations, higher costs.

Zero Standing Privilege is one of those rare initiatives where security, usability, and efficiency align.

• Security: Massively reduced attack surface, near-elimination of privilege drift
• Usability: Faster access provisioning (72 hours → 5 seconds), no more waiting for tickets
• Efficiency: Eliminated manual access reviews, automated revocation, cleaner audit trails

When the casino floors went dark and MGM lost $100 million, it wasn’t because they lacked firewalls or endpoint protection. It was because standing privileges gave attackers time and access to move laterally, escalate, and deploy ransomware.

Your organization has those same standing privileges. The only question is: will you eliminate them proactively, or reactively after an incident?

Start today. Start small. But start.

Because in 2026, zero standing privilege isn’t the future of access management.

It’s the present. And the organizations that recognize that are the ones that will still be standing when the next Scattered Spider comes calling.

Jay Klinkowsky is an identity and access management practitioner with over 15 years of experience helping organizations implement Zero Trust architectures. He writes about identity security, privileged access, and the intersection of AI and cybersecurity at blog.everydayidentity.tech.

For questions, consulting, or to share your ZSP implementation story, reach out on LinkedIn or via the contact form on this site.