Identity isn’t just a security concern. It’s a business enabler. As organizations expand across cloud platforms, remote teams, legacy infrastructure and third-party ecosystems, the complexity of managing identity and access grows exponentially. Yet too often, businesses focus their governance efforts on the obvious systems, while a vast array of independent tools, cloud accounts and legacy assets remain in the shadows.
This fragmented landscape creates one of the most overlooked attack surfaces: unmanaged identities in disconnected systems.
From multicloud sprawl to obscure service subscriptions, effective identity governance demands a holistic, flexible and technologically supported approach. Here’s how to mitigate identity risks in even the most complex environments, and why it’s more urgent than ever.
Beyond The Core: When Identity Lives Outside The Perimeter
Most organizations have identity controls in place for primary systems, like HR platforms, email, cloud storage and enterprise applications. But risk often comes from the fringes.
Consider the marketing platforms, digital ad accounts, shared inboxes, executive travel tools, social media logins and even airline lounge memberships funded by the business. These systems often operate outside the purview of IT or security, with credentials shared ad hoc, access rarely reviewed and no central ownership in place.
It’s the kind of access that rarely makes it into IAM dashboards, but regularly features in breach post-mortems.
Worse, the proliferation of SaaS platforms means that some departments can spin up tools without IT involvement. That autonomy is great for agility, but without visibility or control, it creates unmanaged risk.
The Legacy Challenge: Old Tech, Persistent Access
Legacy systems present a different—but equally challenging—identity problem.
Some older platforms lack API integrations or IAM connectors altogether. Others may run in operational environments (like manufacturing or healthcare) where upgrades are restricted due to validation requirements or regulatory constraints.
In these contexts, access is often maintained manually or locally. There’s no automatic sync with HR records. Users may be long gone, but their credentials still work.
Whether it’s a 20-year-old financial system, a local Active Directory domain at a remote facility or a customer portal built before SSO became standard, legacy systems can’t be ignored. They still contain sensitive data, and they still need to be governed.
The Multicloud Tangle: Sprawl, Shadow IT And Scalability
Cloud adoption has accelerated digital transformation, but it’s also created a governance nightmare.
Many businesses now operate across multiple cloud providers, sometimes with dozens (or even hundreds) of separate cloud accounts. It’s not uncommon for organizations to have upwards of 50 cloud environments, each configured differently, with its own identity settings.
Even at large tech firms, it’s common for development teams to provision their own environments, bypassing central controls. Over time, the cloud identity landscape becomes ungovernable unless steps are taken to consolidate visibility and standardize access policies.
And that doesn’t even account for non-human identities (like APIs, bots and service accounts) that often go unmanaged for years.
Practical Steps For Securing Identity In Complex Environments
To tackle identity risk across such diverse systems, organizations need to adopt an approach that enables oversight across all identity types, without forcing premature consolidation.
Here are some best practices that help:
Discover Everything, Even the Outliers: Start with a comprehensive discovery effort. Identify every system where access is granted, whether digital or physical, human or machine. Use CSV exports, system reports or even manual audits to capture access lists from disconnected platforms. If a system doesn’t support IAM, that doesn’t mean it’s out of scope, it means you’ll need a workaround.
Model Identity Environments with Digital Twins: A digital twin allows you to create a virtual model of your identity ecosystem. You can analyze access relationships, role assignments and policy violations, without needing to modify production systems. This is especially useful for legacy systems, air-gapped environments or disconnected apps where integrations aren’t possible.
Connect the Dots with Knowledge Graphs: Knowledge graphs help map relationships between users, systems, roles and permissions across diverse domains. They reveal conflicts, redundancies and ownership gaps that might be missed in isolated views. You can visualize how a terminated employee still has access to three tools no one’s reviewed, or how a contractor account overlaps with privileged access in production.
Validate with Contextual Data: Link identity records to authoritative sources like HR systems, asset inventories, contract databases. When a user’s employment status or role changes, their access rights should update accordingly. This requires joining data across silos, which is where automation and smart modeling become essential.
Prioritize Cleanup Based on Risk: You don’t need to rip out legacy systems or standardize every platform to make progress. Focus on what matters most: orphaned accounts, privileged access without justification, systems with sensitive data and no oversight. Build localized reports and give department heads the insight they need to act.
The Non-Human Identity Dilemma
With AI adoption rising, non-human identities are multiplying. Bots, automation scripts, AI models and service integrations all require access. However, few organizations apply the same governance rigor to them as they do to human users.
These identities often operate with elevated permissions and no defined owner. Left unchecked, they become perfect hiding places for attackers, or accidental triggers for system failures.
As AI becomes more embedded in business workflows, organizations need to track and manage machine identities with the same scrutiny as people. That includes access reviews, expiration policies and usage monitoring.
See It Before You Fix It
Identity is a moving target. People join, leave, change roles. Systems evolve. Tools get abandoned, but access remains. In such an environment, you can’t manage what you can’t see.
Digital twins and knowledge graphs are powerful enablers of visibility. They allow organizations to make sense of sprawling identity data, find the risks that matter and take action where it counts.
In identity governance, it’s not the systems that shout the loudest that pose the most risk. It’s the quiet ones, running in the background, with no owner, no oversight and no expiration date.
