Service account standards

Alex Smolen
6 min readSep 22, 2021

Service accounts for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications have high levels of access and are shared between multiple people — a tempting target for attackers. But service accounts aren’t just a source of security risk. They can also slow down engineering teams. Laggy approvals for access, flaky integrations, and risky manual changes are speed bumps on the path to delivering value. This post discusses standards you can introduce at your organization to tame service account management.

What are service accounts?