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11/06/2026 11:08 pm
TL;DR: Gartner says fragmented IAM tooling leaves unmanaged visibility gaps that let orphaned accounts, disabled MFA, and exposed machine credentials persist unnoticed, and it predicts 70% of CISOs will use an IVIP by 2028 to shrink that attack surface. The real issue is not tool count but whether identity teams can see, correlate, and remediate access across silos before attackers do.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by AuthMind: Reduce Your IAM Attack Surface Using Visibility, Observability, and Remediation
By the numbers:
- By 2028, 70% of CISOs will utilize an IVIP to shrink their IAM attack surface.
- 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.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce IAM attack surface across disconnected tools?
A: Security teams should first build a unified identity inventory that correlates directories, cloud IAM, PAM, SaaS, and NHI sources.
Q: Why do fragmented IAM tools increase risk for service accounts and API keys?
A: Fragmented tools make it difficult to see where machine credentials were created, who owns them, and whether they still need access.
Q: What breaks when identity reviews do not have a single source of truth?
A: Access reviews lose precision when each system reports a different slice of the identity picture.
Practitioner guidance
- Unify identity data across silos Create a correlation layer that combines directories, cloud IAM, PAM, SaaS, and NHI repositories so ownership, entitlement, and activity can be analysed together.
- Prioritise remediation by exposure, not by queue order Rank unresolved identities by privilege, last use, external exposure, and dependency depth so the highest-risk accounts are addressed first.
- Separate human, NHI, and agentic evidence models Do not force one access review process onto all identity types.
What's in the full article
AuthMind's full post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Gartner's exact IVIP framing and the supporting market language around unified visibility and observability.
- AuthMind's product mapping for hygiene gaps, risky entitlements, and remediation workflows across connected systems.
- The way the vendor translates outcome-driven metrics into dashboards for attack-surface reporting.
- The specific integration surfaces the vendor says it supports across directory, cloud, PAM, and SaaS environments.
👉 Read AuthMind's analysis of Gartner's IAM attack surface guidance →
Identity attack surface visibility: what IAM teams need to fix?
Explore further
12/06/2026 7:40 am
Identity attack surface is now the governing object, not a reporting metric. Gartner's framing is important because it moves IAM leaders away from counting tools and toward controlling exposure. Fragmented identity data breaks the line between policy and enforcement, which means the programme may look mature while still missing orphaned accounts, dormant access, and exposed machine credentials. The practitioner takeaway is that attack surface reduction must become an operating model, not a quarterly report.
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 the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them, which is why stale machine access persists even after discovery.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do organisations know whether IAM observability is actually working?
A: They should look for measurable reductions in dormant accounts, excessive privileges, unresolved exposure, and time needed to close high-risk findings. If observability only produces more alerts or more reports, it is not improving governance. The right signal is a shrinking identity attack surface and faster, more accurate remediation.
👉 Read our full editorial: IAM attack surface visibility is now the control gap that matters
