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24/06/2026 7:03 pm
TL;DR: Identity and access management end-of-life is framed as a migration risk problem, with emphasis on how organisations should move away from legacy identity tooling without creating control gaps, according to Netwrix. The practical lesson is that migration planning, entitlement continuity, and governance evidence matter more than the switch itself.
NHIMG editorial — here’s why we think this discussion matters
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should teams manage IAM end-of-life without breaking access control?
A: Teams should treat IAM end-of-life as a controlled transition of trust, not a software replacement.
Q: Why do legacy identity platforms create risk during migration?
A: Legacy identity platforms create risk because they usually still anchor entitlements, approvals, and certificates when the migration begins.
Practitioner guidance
- Map every live dependency before retiring the platform. List directories, applications, scripts, PAM flows, certification records, and federation links that still rely on the retiring IAM stack.
- Move privileged and service identities in the same migration wave. Treat break-glass accounts, service accounts, certificates, and secrets as a single governed migration stream.
- Require evidence-based decommissioning sign-off. Close the retirement project only after revocations, rebindings, and access recertifications are documented and validated.
What to expect at the briefing
Netwrix's full on-demand webinar covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The migration considerations that matter when an IAM platform reaches end of life and cannot simply be switched off.
- The speaker-led discussion on maintaining identity governance continuity during platform replacement.
- The practical questions teams should ask before replatforming access control, identity lifecycle, and privileged access workflows.
👉 Watch Netwrix's on-demand webinar on IAM end-of-life migration risk →
IAM at end of life: what does safe migration actually require?
Explore further
25/06/2026 4:09 am
Legacy IAM end-of-life is a governance event, not a procurement event. The operational risk is not the replacement itself but the unresolved trust paths left behind by the old platform. When access reviews, entitlement mappings, and audit evidence still depend on it, migration creates a parallel control environment instead of a clean transition. Practitioners should treat platform retirement as a control continuity exercise, not a tooling refresh.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after the targeted organisation is notified, showing a critical gap in remediation procedures, 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.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should be accountable for identity platform decommissioning?
A: Accountability should sit with the identity governance owner, the application owner, and the control owner for privileged or machine access. Decommissioning fails when it is treated as an infrastructure task alone. The authority to retire a platform must include proof that no active access depends on it.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity governance at end of life: what migration risk reveals
