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25/06/2026 1:06 am
TL;DR: Legacy IAM stacks in hybrid and multicloud environments create technical debt that forces organisations to keep duplicate identity providers, support legacy protocols, and defer application rewrites, according to Strata Identity’s summary of Gartner’s "Reduce IAM Technical Debt" report. Orchestration changes the modernization path, but it does not remove the need to rationalise apps, protocols, and governance decisions across human, machine, and autonomous identities.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Strata Identity: Strata named a sample vendor in Gartner’s "Reduce IAM Technical Debt" report
By the numbers:
- 96% of organisations store secrets outside of secrets managers in vulnerable locations including code, config files, and CI/CD tools.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should teams reduce IAM technical debt without rewriting every application?
A: Start by classifying applications by their identity dependencies, then use orchestration where it can standardise access without forcing a full rebuild.
Q: Why does IAM technical debt keep growing in hybrid and multicloud environments?
A: It grows because each environment adds its own trust boundaries, protocol constraints, and ownership model.
Q: What do security teams get wrong about unified SSO?
A: They often treat unified SSO as proof that identity is standardised, when it may only mean the user-facing layer is cleaner.
Practitioner guidance
- Map applications by identity dependency Classify each application by protocol support, identity provider coupling, and whether it can accept federation or needs an interim orchestration layer.
- Separate SSO rollout from governance cleanup Track lifecycle, entitlement, and offboarding controls independently from sign-in unification so the organisation does not mistake a better login experience for stronger identity governance.
- Treat orchestration as a resilience dependency Test identity failover, session continuity, and policy routing under outage scenarios before making orchestration the standard path for critical applications.
What's in the full analysis
Strata Identity's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Gartner’s five technical debt drivers and how they translate into IAM modernisation workstreams.
- How Maverics supports coexistence of multiple identity providers without rewriting legacy applications.
- The specific protocol bridging model for SAML, OpenID Connect, FIDO2, LDAP, and homegrown authentication paths.
- How phased application prioritisation can be aligned to business impact and stakeholder ownership.
👉 Read Strata Identity’s analysis of IAM technical debt and identity orchestration →
IAM technical debt in hybrid environments: what teams should fix?
Explore further
25/06/2026 10:17 am
Identity technical debt is not just an architecture problem, it is a governance lag. When an enterprise keeps legacy authentication paths alive to avoid app rewrites, it also keeps inconsistent policy enforcement alive. That means the real debt is deferred control standardisation across applications, not merely duplicated plumbing. The practitioner implication is that modernization plans must be sequenced by governance risk, not by application age alone.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 92% of organisations expose NHIs to third parties, raising concerns about supply chain security, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do organisations know when orchestration is the right modernization pattern?
A: Orchestration is the right pattern when the application is too important or too brittle to rewrite quickly, but can still accept standardised identity mediation. It is less useful when the real problem is poor ownership or broken lifecycle control, because those issues do not disappear behind a proxy or connector.
👉 Read our full editorial: IAM technical debt is slowing hybrid identity modernization
