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12/06/2026 1:00 am
TL;DR: SaaS sprawl, manual provisioning, delayed deprovisioning, excessive permissions, weak data access controls, inconsistent access reviews, poor policy design, and weak authentication all expand enterprise exposure, according to Zluri’s overview of seven identity and access management risks. The core issue is not a lack of tools but the failure to govern identity lifecycle, access scope, and review discipline together.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Zluri: Security & Compliance 7 Identity & Access Management Risks
By the numbers:
- Zluri says its automation delivers 10 times faster results than manual methods and saves the IT team's efforts by 70%.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams reduce SaaS access risk without slowing onboarding?
A: Use pre-approved role-based access packages for common joiner paths and automate the provisioning steps that do not require human judgment.
Q: Why do access reviews fail to remove unnecessary permissions?
A: They fail when reviewers see a list of entitlements but not enough context to judge whether the access is still needed.
Q: What breaks when offboarding is handled manually in SaaS environments?
A: Manual offboarding often misses applications, shared resources, and privileged functions because revocation depends on people remembering every dependency.
Practitioner guidance
- Build a unified access inventory Correlate HR, SSO, app, finance, and directory data so reviewers can see who has access, what level they hold, and whether the entitlement still matches role and department.
- Automate joiner, mover, and leaver workflows Use deterministic workflows for routine provisioning and deprovisioning so onboarding does not over-grant access and offboarding does not leave stale access behind.
- Tie access reviews to usage evidence Require reviewers to consider activity logs, recent logins, and app usage before approving entitlements, especially for admin accounts and sensitive SaaS applications.
What's in the full article
Zluri's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Discovery-method breakdown for correlating SaaS access data across HRMS, IDPs, directories, finance systems, and browser signals
- Workflow examples for onboarding, access requests, and offboarding that show how the platform sequences provisioning and revocation
- Access review and certification flow details, including how reviewers are notified and how conclusions are recorded
- Examples of auto-remediation actions when access no longer meets policy criteria
👉 Read Zluri's analysis of seven IAM risks in SaaS environments →
SaaS IAM risk gaps: what identity teams need to fix now?
Explore further
12/06/2026 10:37 am
Access visibility is no longer a reporting problem, it is a governance prerequisite. SaaS estates now force identity teams to govern access across too many systems for spreadsheet-based review to work reliably. Once the inventory is incomplete, every downstream decision on onboarding, mover access, deprovisioning, and certification is built on partial truth. The practical conclusion is that IAM maturity now starts with correlation quality, not policy volume.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Two-thirds of enterprises have endured a successful cyberattack resulting from compromised non-human identities, with a quarter encountering multiple attacks, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- Enterprises that have experienced a compromised NHI averaged 2.7 separate incidents in the past 12 months, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when access policy and actual permissions diverge?
A: The identity governance owner remains accountable, because policy failure is still a governance failure even when the drift was caused by manual processes or incomplete tooling. Strong programmes assign clear owners for approval, review, and remediation so every access state can be explained during audit or incident response.
👉 Read our full editorial: Seven IAM risks in SaaS environments that security teams still miss
