Managing the unmanaged: Why organizations need Non-Employee Risk Management (NERM)

Non-Employee Risk Management (NERM) is the process of identifying, governing, and securing digital identities for users who sit outside your organization’s HR system. These include:

• Contractors and consultants
• Partner and supplier personnel
• B2B customers and ecosystem collaborators
• Temporary and seasonal workers
• Volunteers, researchers, or visiting academics
• Agency or clinical staff in healthcare settings

These users are essential — but often managed inconsistently, through spreadsheets, emails, or siloed systems. The result?

• Over-provisioned access that lingers after contracts end
• Unclear ownership of external identities
• Compliance and audit gaps
• Expanded attack surface across your IT environment

NERM introduces the automation, visibility, and control needed to manage these non-employee identities with the same rigour as your employees — strengthening both security and compliance.

As organizations expand their digital ecosystems, the number of third-party and partner identities grows rapidly. Cloud adoption, supplier collaboration, and outsourced service models make manual management impossible to scale.

Without NERM, enterprises face:

• Shadow identities – unmanaged or orphaned accounts that stay active after projects finish
• Manual onboarding bottlenecks – slowing productivity
• Audit blind spots – non-employees excluded from compliance checks
• Inconsistent processes – each department managing access differently

Auditors and regulators increasingly demand consistent controls across all identities — not just employees. Whether you’re in banking, higher education, retail, healthcare, or utilities, NERM has become essential for reducing risk and maintaining compliance.

A financial institution depends on hundreds of third-party IT consultants and service partners. By integrating its vendor management system into its identity governance platform, it automated onboarding and access reviews, reducing dormant accounts by 70% and ensuring compliance with internal audit requirements.

An insurance brokerage firm relies on independent agents and partner firms to serve regional customers. NERM ensures every external user has time-limited, sponsor-approved access to quoting and claims systems, maintaining FCA and GDPR compliance while reducing manual admin by 60%.

Universities collaborate with visiting academics, research partners, and contractors. With NERM, they can now automate joiner–mover–leaver processes for these non-employee identities, ensuring access aligns with academic schedules and funding timelines — without increasing IT workload.

A large retailer hires temporary staff during seasonal peaks. NERM automates onboarding for these short-term roles, granting immediate access on day one and automatically removing it when contracts expire — maintaining efficiency without compromising security.

A healthcare provider that works with agency nurses and temporary clinicians now uses NERM to enforce time-bound, policy-based access. This ensures patient records remain protected while supporting staffing flexibility across multiple facilities.

A regional energy provider works with outsourced engineering firms and IT contractors. NERM delivers complete visibility and control over who can access critical systems, helping the organization comply with industry-specific cybersecurity regulations and reduce the risk of insider threats.

Telecoms operators face increased scrutiny under the UK Telecommunications (Security) Act (TSA), which requires operators to mitigate supply-chain and access risks. NERM enables telecoms providers to manage the full lifecycle of vendor, contractor, and partner identities — ensuring compliance with the TSA’s mandate for continuous risk assessment, least-privilege access, and rapid deprovisioning when relationships end.

Many organizations now operate within complex partner networks. For example:

• A technology vendor providing access to distributors, managed service partners, and resellers through shared portals.
• A manufacturing company collaborating with supply chain partners that need access to logistics or design platforms.
• A regional healthcare network partnering with third-party labs or telehealth providers for shared patient data access.

In each case, NERM ensures partner and B2B identities are governed consistently — automating provisioning, enforcing least-privilege access, and delivering full audit trails without disrupting collaboration.

1. Authoritative Source Integration – Connect vendor, partner, or CRM systems as trusted identity sources.
2. Automated Lifecycle Management – Enforce consistent joiner–mover–leaver processes for all external identities.
3. Clear Ownership – Assign internal sponsors for each contractor, partner, or third-party account.
4. Policy-Based Access Controls – Apply least-privilege principles automatically.
5. Continuous Compliance Monitoring – Maintain audit readiness across your extended ecosystem.

At ProofID, we help organizations across financial services, higher education, retail, healthcare, and utilities gain control over non-employee and partner risk through our advisory, implementation, and managed services.

Our experts can help you:

• Assess your current exposure to unmanaged and partner identities
• Design a scalable NERM framework aligned with your security strategy
• Implement automated controls using leading identity platforms
• Provide managed services to ensure continuous governance and reporting

If you’re unsure who’s accessing your systems — or how long they’ve had that access — it’s time to take a closer look at Non-Employee Risk Management. Let’s make every identity in your ecosystem — employee or not — visible, governed, and trusted.

1  “93 % of organizations had two or more identity-related breaches in the past year.” CyberArk+2CyberArk+2
2  “In 2022, 20 % of data breaches were linked to third parties.” IBM
3  “Dormant service accounts with privilege were found in more than 70 % of enterprise environments.” scworld.com