Glossary
Entitlement Creep
Entitlement creep is the slow drift between the access someone actually needs for their current responsibilities and the access they've actually accumulated — new permissions added for a project, a temporary assignment, a one-off task, that are rarely revisited once the reason for them has passed. Each individual grant made sense when it was made; the sum of them, unreviewed, often does not.
Because creep happens incrementally, it's difficult to notice from inside the process that causes it — no single grant looks excessive on its own. It typically only becomes visible from an outside vantage point: an access review, an incident investigation, or an audit that compares current access against current role.