Continuous Account Ownership Maintenance: The Key to Stronger Identity Governance
Some identity security problems don’t feel like security problems at all. Maintaining a clean account ownership register is right at the top of that list. It’s one of those problems we wish HR, or DevOps had a better handle on. But ultimately, it falls to the people who rely on (or benefit from) it most.
Ownership tracking is easy to overlook until an urgent problem is staring you in the face. It’s at that moment you find yourself saying, “Why didn’t I clean this up last month?”
So why don’t we stay on top of this? It’s genuinely challenging to keep track of, especially as a company grows. If you’re struggling with it, you're far from alone. The effort involved is inherent to the very nature of modern digital identities. As workplaces get more dynamic, organizational and structural changes happen more frequently.
Manual processes and spreadsheets for this kind of work have become… laughable. Continuously updated account ownership records don’t just improve identity operations; they lay the foundation for everything else in security.
In this post, we’ll break down why account ownership matters, where it falls apart, and how to build a system that’s ready for your next incident, cleanup, or audit. Keep in mind, we’re focused on Identity and Account ownership, but the details enclosed apply to all asset ownership across an enterprise.
The Critical Importance of Identity Ownership
Have you ever been at home, unable to find something? Car keys, a screwdriver, maybe some fresh batteries… When you finally decide to send that text. “Hey Peter, have you seen my Stapler?” In seconds, you get a reply with an answer you never would have considered.
In your household, it’s easy to know who to text. Maybe there’s even a group chat. But in an enterprise, you need a map just to get to the right team, let alone the right person.
In security, more often than not, we’re securing things that we didn’t build or buy. Without an inventory and ownership structure, you’re wasting precious time.
A few examples of how this plays out:
Contractor Offboarding: In a dormant account review, you find a contractor account that hasn’t been used in months. Who can confirm it’s ok to shut down?
Data Exfiltration Triage: The SOC sees a huge amount of data being siphoned from an integration that was set up months ago. Who can tell us whether this is a new product release or a malevolent sign of data theft?
Incident Response: After finding out about a data leak from a threat intel partner, your IR team discovers API keys stored in a public Github Repo. Whose keys are they, and what business process will we shut down if we rotate them?
These are just a few critical situations that underline how vital clear ownership is. The best part? If you get it right, you can automate identity and security operations in a way that exceeds your wildest dreams.
Frameworks Make it Mandatory
If you’re not sold on the value of building an identity inventory, keep in mind that it isn't merely best practice—it's mandatory under almost every compliance framework, regulation, and attestation out there. (SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, etc.)
In policy documents, organizations often set themselves up to address ownership periodically. That often leads to skipped monthly or quarterly cleanup actions and leaves more work for audit prep. Waiting until audit prep to update your account ownership sheet is the kind of thing that keeps the security vs. compliance debate going strong.
Diverse Identity Types
Identity governance relies on chokepoints: gates, turnstiles, and systems of record. But when every identity type originates from a different business action, no single system can show you the full picture.
Good governance programs always start with an inventory. Let’s take a look at the various identity types you’ll want to include, and why keeping an owner up to date is crucial. Since your org is special (we all are), the following list is a starting point:
Admins: It’s a best practice for privileged users to have multiple accounts, one for daily use (their employee account) and others for administrative tasks. Tracking the owners of these elevated accounts is often overlooked, especially if they were manually created or inherited during a rushed deployment. Given their sensitive nature, mapping the admin account back to the employee account is crucial. If you’re relying on HRIS deprovisioning during termination, and these aren’t mapped, they’ll be missed.
Non-Human Identities (NHI): NHIs are used for systematic integrations. They’re created for apps, scripts, or services to communicate with each other. Anyone who can accept an OAuth grant or spin up an integration is responsible for introducing a non-human identity. If you haven’t completely locked down grants and key generation, you’ve probably got shadow access all over the place.
Contractors: Contractors aren’t always represented in the primary HR system. While there are usually governance processes for onboarding contractors, we regularly see accounts get created outside of that process, especially in SaaS, where no SSO is involved. Without knowing who brought the contractor into the org, whether they were vetted, or when their engagement ends, identity teams are left guessing how they should handle these accounts. HR can’t help you here.
AI Agents: This one is tough and changing fast. AI agents are often granted broad access quickly, and their behavior is opaque. Without proper tracking, agents can inadvertently break RBAC policies or introduce shadow access. Ownership here means not just identifying who spun up the agent’s access, but also understanding the downstream systems it interacts with and what access it propagates.
Employees: Employee account ownership generally ties back to your org chart. Hiring managers and employees act as stakeholders on the account. Thanks to HRIS and IAM integrations, this can be a quick win, but gaps still exist, especially if HR processes lag behind reality.
Shared Accounts: While discouraged and often frowned upon, shared accounts still exist. Expediency and license savings sometimes win out. Since multiple users access them, you must designate a clear owner who understands the account's purpose and can be contacted to discuss security requirements.
Across all these types, one truth holds: every account must ultimately roll up to a principal identity.
Principal Identities
Every scenario above highlights the need for a parent-child relationship between accounts. Each account should either represent a principal identity or be tied back to one. This prevents infinite identity ownership loops, like an NHI listed as the owner for a contractor account, which should never happen. At least not until AI Agents start hiring human employees.
Data Decay
With time, things change. Employees get promoted, transferred, and terminated. Contractors come and go. New management re-orgs departments. Infrastructure spins up and down.
In any of these situations, ownership data quickly becomes outdated. It's simply the nature of modern business. And it’s why spreadsheets and manual maintenance have become outdated solutions to an ongoing problem.
Building a More Resilient Ownership Process
When you’re thinking about proactive and continuous ownership maintenance, here are a few things to consider. Remember, you should mostly be concerned with the changes to principal identities who are listed as owners.
Watch for Org Chart Changes: New managers, new titles, terminations, and more give you a good trigger for re-certifying ownership. For transfers, start with a simple question like “did you just change roles?” and if so, follow up with an ownership recertification.
Monitor Account Dormancy: For both contractors and employees, watch for long periods of inactivity. This can indicate a missed offboarding, in which case, your ownership is out of date.
Ownership at Creation: Inventory the ways new identities are created. Establish governance guardrails that require ownership information at the time of account creation. If full automation isn’t feasible, alert your team to follow up when critical fields are missing.
Why AI Agents Are Ideal Partners in Ownership Management
Given the constant and ongoing changes, manual and periodic processes won’t keep you up to date. This is where AI agents can shine in ways last year’s tech simply can't.
Agents never sleep: They continuously monitor changes to your org chart, activity levels, and new account creations.
They aren’t limited by rules: Rather than triggering a fixed workflow from a single field, agents scan broadly and fill gaps intelligently.
They’re context-aware: Agents can read across spreadsheets and systems, interpreting context that other tools can’t touch. They can also transform a point-in-time spreadsheet into a living source of truth, eliminating the need to migrate your data to another system.
They’re not bound by integrations: Agents can navigate UIs directly, bypassing API limitations and SSO taxes. They can fit themselves into existing workflows, send Slack messages or emails, and trigger escalations when they haven’t been able to complete their task.
They’re flexible: Memory and prompts give agents the adaptability that hard-coded scripts and platforms lack.
Where traditional systems fall short, AI agents step in to continuously govern. They give you a real-time, adaptive ownership model that keeps pace with your business, closing the gap between compliance as a checkbox and compliance as a living, breathing reality.
Make your Ownership Register a Security Advantage
Continuously managed, accurate ownership data transforms identity governance from a compliance burden into a security strength. With AI-driven automation, rigorous identity governance becomes both attainable and sustainable.
Periodic audit-driven maintenance activities aren't enough anymore. Continuous, agent-powered compliance turns governance into a living system, not a yearly event. Identity governance doesn’t have to be a lagging task. With the right approach, it becomes an advantage, always on, always ready, and always working for you.
If you're ready to move beyond spreadsheets and manual guesswork, AI agents are your path to clear, continuous, and defensible account ownership.
