Topic starter
16/10/2026 9:31 am
TL;DR: Enterprises have fragmented views of access, where IGA, PAM, ITDR, CIEM, directories, and HR each govern different slices while service accounts, out-of-band entitlements, and AI agents stay invisible, according to Oak. The architectural gap matters more as AI expands the number of credentials and actors that no team can review in time.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Oak: “Identity has plenty of tools. It never had an operating system.”.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when identity tools cannot see each other's access data?
A: Access reviews, privilege cleanup, and offboarding all become incomplete because each tool only sees local entitlements.
Q: Why do fragmented identities make AI access risk harder to govern?
A: Fragmented identities make AI risk harder to govern because assistants and copilots can only be limited as well as the user accounts they inherit.
Q: How do security teams reduce blind spots between assigned access and actual reach?
A: They need runtime evidence, entitlement correlation, and relationship context in one view.
Practitioner guidance
- Map your actual control boundary Inventory which identities each current platform can truly see, then compare that with service accounts, direct application entitlements, and any AI agent accounts that exist outside the central catalogue.
- Reconcile granted access with observed use Use runtime evidence, activity logs, and resource-level entitlements to identify where assigned privileges exceed what identities actually use, especially for inherited or nested access.
- Assign owners to every agent identity Require accountable ownership, lifecycle status, and review responsibility for each agent before it is allowed to hold credentials or reach production systems.
Bottom line: Identity governance fails when each platform sees only its own slice of access and cannot reconcile the full estate into one operational model.
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16/10/2026 9:32 am
Identity governance without a shared operating layer is not governance at all: It is a collection of partial control planes that each tell the truth about a different subset of access. Oak's core point is architectural: if the programme cannot correlate humans, service accounts, agents, and application-native grants into one model, then policy is always downstream of reality. Practitioners should treat that as a structural boundary, not a tooling inconvenience.
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: How should organisations govern AI agents alongside human identity and device access?
A: Organisations should treat AI agents as a separate identity class with their own entitlement boundaries, logging expectations, and approval model. Human IAM controls often assume interactive sign-in and review cycles, which do not fit autonomous or programmatic access. The safer approach is to define actor-specific policy and verify which access paths can be delegated without expanding trust unnecessarily.
👉 Read our full editorial: Identity tools need an operating system to close access blind spots