Why DevOps Still Struggles With Least Privilege (Even In 2025)
Security Boulevard, September 19,2025
Least privilege remains one of cybersecurity's most fundamental principles, yet in practice, DevOps teams are failing at it-specifically for the workloads they manage daily.
While human identity management has mature patterns like SSO, MFA, and role-based access control, DevOps teams primarily deal with Non-Human Identities (NHIs): the apps, services, scripts, and CI/CD jobs that run across on-prem, cloud, and SaaS environments.
These workloads now outnumber human users 45:1, yet they're still managed with static credentials designed for predictable human patterns.
The way we build and ship software today makes least privilege almost impossible to enforce for these workloads.