Topic starter
11/07/2026 8:29 pm
TL;DR: Identity management now has to unify authentication, access administration, governance and privileged controls to reduce cybersecurity risk without disrupting operations, particularly where identities, assets and regulatory obligations intersect, according to Soffid. The practical issue is less product choice than whether IAM, IGA, SSO, MFA and PAM are actually operating as one governed control plane.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Soffid: “Identity Management Solutions for the major challenges of enterprise cybersecurity”.
Key questions
Q: When should organisations unify IAM, PAM, and NHI governance?
A: Unify them when the same applications, data, and business processes are already being accessed by people, service accounts, and agents.
Q: Why does fragmented identity management create security and audit problems?
A: Fragmentation creates inconsistent truth about who has access, which exceptions exist, and whether offboarding actually worked.
Q: What breaks when access reviews and offboarding are handled inconsistently?
A: Inconsistent reviews and offboarding create lingering access, compliance gaps, and unnecessary exposure after roles change or people leave.
Practitioner guidance
- Unify identity policy decisions Map authentication, authorisation, governance and privileged control to a single operating model so different teams are not making conflicting access decisions.
- Tie lifecycle events to entitlement changes Make onboarding, mover events, termination and access revocation trigger the same policy workflow so entitlements do not drift outside governance.
- Bring PAM under the same identity governance Ensure privileged account approvals, monitoring and review follow the same identity source and audit trail as standard user access.
Bottom line: Identity risk rises when authentication, access administration and privileged control are handled as separate processes instead of one governed model.
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11/07/2026 8:59 pm
Identity unification is a governance requirement, not an architecture preference. When authentication, access administration, governance and privileged control sit in separate stacks, no one owns the end-to-end identity decision. That creates policy gaps, audit friction and inconsistent enforcement across the lifecycle. The implication is that identity programmes should be judged on control coherence, not on the number of tools deployed.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 69% of security leaders agree identity management must fundamentally shift to address agentic AI systems, according to the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
A question worth separating out:
Q: When should security teams prioritise PAM over broader identity governance?
A: Prioritise PAM when the immediate risk is privileged execution, such as accounts that can modify systems, access production data, or change infrastructure. Prioritise broader identity governance when the larger problem is incomplete inventory, weak ownership, or missing offboarding. For most NHI programmes, both are needed, but the order depends on where the highest blast radius sits.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity management must unify access, governance and privileged control