Over-privileged accounts are one of the most commonly exploited weaknesses in ransomware and other cyberattacks. Hidden or unmanaged entitlements provide attackers with opportunities for lateral movement, privilege escalation, and long-term persistence—often going undetected until it’s too late.

Despite progress in Identity and Access Governance (IAG), many organizations still rely on manual processes and disconnected tools, making it difficult to enforce least privilege and maintain visibility across complex IT environments.

The Limits of Manual IAG

Spreadsheets, tickets, and ad-hoc scripts don’t scale. Manual access reviews drift from policy, orphaned entitlements accrete, and privilege changes are missed during joiner-mover-leaver events. The result is standing privileges that quietly expand the blast radius available to an attacker.

How Welford IAG Closes the Gap

Welford IAG fully abstracts manual access provisioning across the estate—from legacy applications and cloud platforms to directory services, Linux environments, and databases. Access is autonomously provisioned and de-provisioned through approval-driven workflows, removing human bottlenecks and reducing the risk of misconfigurations.

Autonomous fulfilment: Integrates with hosts to grant the right access at the right time—and revoke it everywhere it was granted, on schedule or on signal.

JIT + Zero Trust by Default

By enforcing Just-In-Time (JIT) Access across the board and applying Zero Trust principles, Welford IAG ensures access is intentional, tightly controlled, and time-bound. Each grant is continuously verified and mapped to a clear business reason—then automatically expires.

No standing privilege: grants have explicit start and end.
Risk-aware approvals: policies and context drive who can approve what.
End-to-end auditability: every decision and change is captured.

RBAC, Reviews & Real-Time Revoke

With role-based access control (RBAC), automated entitlement reviews, and real-time de-provisioning, teams maintain least privilege continuously—not just during quarterly audits. Drift is detected early and remediated automatically.

Role catalogs align access with job functions and duties segregation.
Scheduled certifications surface exceptions and certify what should remain.
Immediate revoke across systems compresses incident response time.

Outcomes You Can Expect

Reduced attack surface and minimized lateral movement.
Smaller blast radius via short-lived, purpose-bound privileges.
Confidence against ransomware through deterministic de-provisioning.
Lower operational load—no ticket chasing, fewer manual errors.

— Welford Systems, advancing Identity Governance for a Zero Trust world.