Identity fragmentation and privilege creep: what IAM teams miss

TL;DR: Fragmented identity stores, orphaned accounts, privilege creep, and weak lifecycle controls create persistent IAM risk across employees, contractors, service accounts, and digital agents, according to SafePaaS. Security-first identity and access management is now about closing operational gaps before compliance reporting can catch up.

NHIMG editorial — based on content published by SafePaaS: security-first identity and access management software for enterprise resilience

By the numbers:

• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
• 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
• 79% of organisations have experienced secrets leaks, with 77% of these incidents resulting in tangible damage.

Questions worth separating out

Q: How should security teams reduce privilege creep across human and non-human identities?

A: Start by tying access to authoritative lifecycle events, not manual tickets or periodic clean-up.

Q: Why do fragmented identity stores increase access risk?

A: Because no single team can reliably see which identities exist, what they can do, or whether the same access has been granted multiple times in different systems.

Q: What breaks when lifecycle management is still mostly manual?

A: Manual lifecycle handling leaves access active after role changes, project exits, and departures, which creates orphaned accounts and stale privileges.

Practitioner guidance

• Map every identity store to a single governance owner Inventory cloud, SaaS, on-prem, and directory systems, then assign one accountable team for entitlement data quality, review cadence, and exception handling across them.
• Automate joiner-mover-leaver events for all actor types Tie provisioning and deprovisioning to authoritative HR, vendor-management, and workload events so stale access is removed when the business relationship changes.
• Move privileged access to short-lived approvals Use just-in-time access for elevated roles and high-risk administrative functions so standing privilege does not remain available between tasks.

What's in the full article

SafePaaS's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:

• How the platform automates full user lifecycle workflows across onboarding, role change, and offboarding
• How privileged identity management is integrated with governance, risk, and compliance controls
• How the software centralises oversight across cloud and on-prem systems during access review
• How policy-based controls and analytics are positioned for day-to-day identity operations

👉 Read SafePaaS's article on security-first identity access management →

Identity fragmentation and privilege creep: what IAM teams miss?

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