Least privilege is the principle that limits the damage when something goes wrong. If an attacker compromises a regular user account, the question is how far that single foothold lets them move. If a contractor's credentials are misused, the question is what those credentials could touch in the first place. In both cases, the answer is shaped by the access decisions made months earlier, when the role was granted and never revisited.
The principle is straightforward to state and difficult to operate. Permissions accumulate. People change roles and keep their old access alongside the new. Service accounts grow privileges for short-term projects that never get cleaned up. Administrator rights are issued for one task and held indefinitely. Each accretion is individually rational and collectively dangerous, because the resulting access landscape no longer reflects what anyone actually needs.
Mature implementations treat least privilege as a continuous discipline rather than a configuration setting. Privileged access is time-bound and reviewed, often through a privileged access management platform. Joiner, mover, and leaver events trigger access changes rather than additions. Standing administrative privilege is the exception rather than the default. The Askara Solutions agent watches the gap between what each identity has and what its role description says it needs, and surfaces drift to the access reviewers before it turns into an audit finding.