Topic starter
11/06/2026 10:39 pm
TL;DR: IT teams in 2026 are still losing time and control to manual onboarding, legacy systems, weak password practices, outsourcing risk, and poor asset tracking, according to Zluri. The underlying problem is not staffing alone but identity process sprawl, where access, review, and reporting are spread across disconnected systems and workflows.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Zluri: “7 Biggest Challenges Encountered By IT Teams in 2026”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when identity tasks stay manual in legacy or disconnected systems?
A: Manual identity tasks usually break consistency, speed, and accountability.
Q: Why do legacy systems make AI governance harder for IAM teams?
A: Legacy systems fragment identity, device, and application control, which makes it difficult to see who or what has access at any moment.
Q: What are the biggest signs that identity process sprawl is hurting operations?
A: The strongest signs are repeated data entry, slow onboarding, frequent rework, inconsistent access records, and reports that do not match current system state.
Practitioner guidance
- Automate joiner workflows end to end Replace manual onboarding re-entry with system-to-system workflows that pull authoritative employee data from HR and push it into access provisioning without duplicate handling.
- Centralise access review evidence Stop treating reporting as a separate task and generate entitlement, application, and audit evidence from the same governed workflow used to manage access.
- Inventory the legacy workflows that still need manual updates Identify which identity tasks still depend on spreadsheets, email approvals, or hand-edited records, then rank them by business and security impact.
Bottom line: The article frames IT teams’ challenge as identity process sprawl, where manual work and disconnected workflows weaken governance across onboarding, access changes, and reporting.
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This topic was modified 4 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group
12/06/2026 6:54 am
Identity process sprawl is a governance failure before it is an efficiency problem. The article shows that IT teams lose control when onboarding, reporting, and access changes are split across manual steps and disconnected systems. That fragmentation weakens auditability, slows entitlement changes, and makes it harder to prove who approved what and when. For practitioners, the issue is not only labour cost but loss of control over the identity lifecycle.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Nearly 60% of IT leaders cite restrictive cost and complexity as a weakness of legacy identity governance, according to the 2025 State of Identity Governance Report.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How should organisations govern outsourced access and partner accounts?
A: Treat outsourced access as part of the identity lifecycle, not as a side arrangement. The account should have a named owner, a clear purpose, a review cadence, and a defined revocation trigger so access ends when the work ends or the relationship changes.
👉 Read our full editorial: IT teams’ biggest 2026 challenge is identity process sprawl
This post was modified 4 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group