Five mistakes teams make with access control

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit access control.

Security is a maintenance habit rather than a purchase, which is why it drifts. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Common failure modes

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Give the least access that lets someone do their job
• Review who has access when people change roles
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Shared logins destroy accountability. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Where to go from here

In practice

The realistic threat for most small businesses is automated and opportunistic, not targeted. Three things worth confirming about access control before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Give the least access that lets someone do their job — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.