I Gave a Service Account Full Admin Access, Here's What Happened Next

Source: Dev.to

Story

I gave a service account full admin access once—just to get things working quickly. I told myself I’d restrict it later.

Later never came.

Three months passed. That service account was still sitting there with more permissions than it needed—quietly, invisibly, a ticking time bomb nobody was watching.

This is how most cloud environments get messy: not from big mistakes, but from small shortcuts that never get cleaned up. The “I’ll fix it later” culture in cloud security is more dangerous than any misconfiguration. Because “later” feels responsible in the moment. You acknowledge the problem; you just don’t solve it.

What actually helped me was treating every temporary fix like a bug: log it, track it, and set a deadline. If it doesn’t have a deadline, it doesn’t exist.

Don’t let your shortcuts outlive your memory of why you made them.