Removing local admin rights is one of the smartest security moves you can make. Permanent admin access is a massive security risk, and most users don’t actually need those privileges for their day-to-day work.
Unfortunately, plenty of organizations mess up the execution. They revoke admin rights with good intentions and end up with angry users, broken workflows, and a helpdesk drowning in tickets.
The difference between a smooth transition and a disaster usually comes down to avoiding a few common mistakes.
1. Revoking Rights Without Communicating the Change First
Users finding out they’ve lost admin access when they try to install something is not a great way to roll out a security initiative. They’re confused, frustrated, and immediately assume IT is making their job harder for no reason.
Communication needs to happen before the change. Tell people what’s happening, when it’s happening, and why. Explain how they’ll request elevation when they need it. Give them a timeline and a point of contact for questions.
When users understand the reasoning and know what to expect, they’re far more likely to cooperate.
2. Not Identifying Which Applications Need Elevation Before the Rollout
You can’t know what’s going to break until you know what people are actually running with admin privileges. Some applications legitimately require elevation, and you won’t find out which ones until users start complaining.
Run a discovery period first. Use pre-revocation logging to see what’s being elevated across your environment. Let it run for a few weeks to capture typical usage patterns. Then analyze the results and pre-approve the applications that actually need admin rights.
Skipping this step means you’re flying blind, and you’ll spend weeks reactively approving applications instead of proactively building policies.
3. Removing Admin Rights from Everyone at Once
Revoking admin rights across the entire organization on the same day is asking for trouble. When something goes wrong, it affects everyone simultaneously. Your helpdesk gets overwhelmed, critical workflows break, and you’ve got no bandwidth to fix issues because you’re dealing with hundreds of problems at once.
Phase the rollout. Start with a pilot group from different departments. Learn what breaks, adjust your policies, and then expand to the next group. This gives you time to fix issues without creating organization-wide chaos.
4. Failing to Set Up an Approval Process Before Revoking Rights
If you remove admin rights but don’t give users a way to request elevation, you’ve just created a bottleneck. People can’t do their jobs, and they have no idea how to get help.
Your approval process needs to be in place and tested before you revoke anything. Users should know exactly how to request elevation, who approves it, and how long it takes. Whether it’s automated approvals, manual review, or a hybrid approach, the workflow has to work from day one.
5. Not Providing Appropriate Workflows for Developers and Power Users
Developers, engineers, and other power users need elevated access more frequently than standard users. They’re installing development tools, configuring environments, and running processes that require admin privileges.
Revoking their admin rights without providing workflows that match how developers actually work creates unnecessary friction. Forcing developers to request manual approval for every npm package or IDE plugin turns your most technical users into your biggest critics.
Give them access to admin sessions for sustained elevated work, pre-approve their common development tools, or use machine learning to automatically approve applications they use regularly. Developers can work securely without permanent admin rights when you build policies that fit their actual workflows.
6. Overlooking Service Accounts and Automated Processes
Service accounts, scheduled tasks, and automated scripts often run with admin privileges. When you revoke rights, these processes start failing silently. Backups stop running, reports don’t generate, and integrations break without anyone noticing until something important goes wrong.
Audit service accounts and automated processes before you revoke rights. Make sure they’re either running under dedicated service accounts or configured to work without admin access. Otherwise, you’ll be fixing broken automation for weeks.
7. Treating All Users the Same Regardless of Job Requirements
A finance analyst and a software developer have very different access needs. So do remote workers, contractors, and IT staff. Applying the same policies to everyone creates unnecessary friction.
Build different policies for different user groups. Standard users might need manual approval for everything. Developers might get time-limited admin sessions. IT staff might get broader access with full logging. Tailoring policies to actual job requirements makes the whole system work better.
8. Not Documenting Which Users Had Admin Rights and Why
When you need to troubleshoot or make exceptions later, having no record of the original setup makes everything harder. You don’t know who had admin rights, why they had them, or what business justification existed.
Document the current state before you change anything. Track which users have admin rights, which applications they’re elevating, and what their role requires. This gives you a baseline and makes it easier to create appropriate policies.
9. Forgetting About Mobile and Remote Workers
Remote workers who aren’t connected to your network lose admin rights but can’t reach your approval system. They’re stuck without a way to request elevation or get work done.
Plan for offline scenarios. Use PIN codes, cached policies, or other methods to handle elevation requests when users aren’t connected. Remote work is too common to treat network connectivity as a given.
How Admin By Request EPM Addresses These Challenges
Most of these mistakes come down to poor planning and rushed execution. Admin By Request’s EPM solution gives you the tools to roll out privilege management properly.
Discovery before deployment. Pre-revocation logging runs in the background while users still have admin rights, capturing what they’re actually elevating. You see real usage patterns across your environment and build policies based on data instead of guesswork. This eliminates the problem of discovering critical applications only after users lose access.
Phased rollout support. You can deploy to pilot groups first, test your policies with real users, and expand gradually once you’ve ironed out issues. The platform handles different deployment stages without requiring you to manage multiple configurations manually.
Flexible policies for different user types. Developers can get time-limited admin sessions that don’t require approval for every task. Standard users get per-application elevation with manual or automated approval. IT staff get the elevated access they need to support everyone else. You’re not forcing one policy on everyone regardless of their actual job requirements.
Offline access that actually works. Remote workers get PIN codes for offline elevation requests. They don’t need network connectivity to get work done. The system caches policies locally and syncs activity logs when connectivity returns, so there are no gaps in your audit trail.
Approval workflows that scale. You can require manual approval for everything, automate approvals for pre-approved applications, use machine learning to approve frequently-used apps, or mix all three approaches. The workflows adapt to your organization instead of forcing you into a rigid process.
Complete audit logging. Every elevation gets logged: who elevated what, when, why, and what happened during the session. You’ve got visibility into privileged activity without gaps, which matters for both security and compliance.
Get Started Without the Usual Chaos
Removing admin rights doesn’t have to mean broken workflows and frustrated users. With proper planning and the right tools, you can improve endpoint security without sacrificing productivity.
Start with our free plan for up to 25 endpoints to test the approach in your environment, or book a demo to see how Admin By Request EPM handles these challenges in practice.
