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12/06/2026 10:14 pm
TL;DR: Identity sprawl across hybrid environments, multiple clouds, and machine identities is making identity-based attacks harder to contain, and Axiad argues that identity fabrics are the process layer needed to unify risk-aware control across siloed IAM systems. The real shift is from product thinking to interoperable identity governance, where identity becomes the last perimeter that matters.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Axiad: The Next Big Thing in Identity Security: Identity Fabrics
By the numbers:
- 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, increasing unauthorised access and broadening the attack surface.
- Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
- NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce identity sprawl across hybrid and multi-cloud environments?
A: Start by building a complete identity inventory across human users, machine identities, partners, and cloud principals, then map where each identity is governed.
Q: Why do siloed IAM systems make identity risk harder to manage?
A: Siloed IAM systems force each platform to interpret identity in isolation, which makes privilege review, risk scoring, and incident response inconsistent.
Q: What do organisations get wrong about machine identities and identity governance?
A: They often treat machine identities as an operational detail rather than a governed population with its own lifecycle and privilege profile.
Practitioner guidance
- Map identity silos before redesigning controls Inventory human, machine, customer, partner, and cloud identities across every IAM stack, then document where entitlement data and risk data stop flowing.
- Prioritise shared risk telemetry between IAM and security operations Require identity and risk signals to flow into SOC, SIEM, SOAR, and GRC workflows so compromised credentials can be assessed in context.
- Right-size privileged accounts and machine identities together Review service accounts, workloads, and cloud principals alongside human entitlements so excess privilege is not reduced in one domain while remaining untouched in another.
What's in the full article
Axiad's full blog post covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The step-by-step argument for why identity fabrics should be treated as a system of systems rather than a single product
- The article's five-step adoption sequence for inventorying, prioritising, unifying, and connecting identity controls
- The specific examples Axiad uses to show how identity and authentication tools should be aligned with business value
- The vendor's practical framing for integrating IAM with SOC, SIEM, SOAR, and GRC workflows
👉 Read Axiad's analysis of identity fabrics and identity sprawl →
Identity fabrics and identity sprawl: what IAM teams need to fix?
Explore further
13/06/2026 12:53 am
Identity fabrics are a governance response to identity sprawl, not a new product layer. The article is right to reject the idea that one platform can solve identity security across every system. What matters is whether teams can make identity, privilege, and risk visible across directories, clouds, workloads, and third parties as one operating model. Practitioners should treat this as a process architecture problem first and a tooling problem second.
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: How do teams know if an identity fabric is actually working?
A: Look for shared identity and risk data across IAM, SOC, GRC, and cloud platforms, plus evidence that privilege decisions are based on that shared context. If teams still need manual reconciliation to understand who or what has access, the fabric is not operational. Effective fabric behaviour is visible when entitlement, lifecycle, and risk changes move together.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity fabrics expose why identity sprawl now defines security risk
