Identities in the modern enterprise are increasingly less human and more autonomous, powered by the rise in AI agents, APIs and other non-human identities (NHIs). The result is often an entitlement sprawl, where operations take place without human oversight and with privileged access. This non-linear evolution has meant many businesses have had to respond using bolted-on tools, rather than one unified, enterprise-grade platform.
Shadow IT and siloed directories further increase vulnerabilities and security gaps. The attack surface widens even more with every new hire, business acquisition and cloud migration. For IT leaders responsible for complex Active Directory (AD) environments, this scenario is an identity debt problem.
What is identity debt, and why is it growing?
Identity debt is the gap between the access that’s been granted and the access that should have been granted. Of course, there are many reasons for this growing imbalance.
Organizations are developing ecosystems across multiple environments, from on-premises to cloud. Pressure comes from end users, customers and internal teams who all need real-time access to resources. Plus, there’s a rise in machines that offer the chance to compete at unprecedented speed and scale but can’t really function within traditional cybersecurity constraints.
The misalignments, inconsistencies and lack of interoperability mean risks may remain undetected until it’s too late and they are only discovered through an audit, breach or failed certification. There’s no unified platform visibility, just systems and internal processes that are likely to be fragmented and duplicated and form the three pillars of identity debt.
The three pillars of identity debt: Access sprawl, privileged overreach and AD entropy
The challenge with identity debt is that, like financial debt, it compounds over time, especially when left unchecked. That’s something that can easily happen in an enterprise when, every year, hundreds of workers change roles, join and leave, and third parties are temporarily hired for projects. The risks manifest themselves in three pillars:
Access sprawl
The more identities that connect to enterprise resources, the more difficult it becomes to maintain access visibility. Instead, permissions and privileges are left to expand ungoverned. The resulting access sprawl results in attack surface vulnerabilities from:
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Orphaned accounts
Short-term projects may have finished, with sensitive data or intellectual property left to reside in repositories. At scale, these can soon be forgotten about by account owners moving out of the organization, left for threat actors to exploit. -
Permission creep
The dynamism of modern organizations is reflected in the speed that employees need access to resources. However, when they move roles or are seconded, they often need different permissions, perhaps elevated. At enterprise scale, this fluidity means permissions can get added without others being removed, with the number of permissions creeping up over time.
Privileged overreach
This pillar is highly prevalent in enterprises where the volume of workers and their often-shifting role changes, coupled with the rise in machine identities, pose risks around:
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Standing privileges
Team members may have been granted elevated permissions temporarily. But without a system for automating privileged access management (PAM), their accounts are left open with unmanaged privileged access, offering attackers a route into the business. -
NHI privilege vulnerabilities
With NHIs now outnumbering their human counterparts 82:1, the attack surface has grown exponentially. AI agents, APIs and other workloads that require scripts can all be given excessive privileges, while environments may have non-expiring secrets or dormant identities that aren’t visible.
AD entropy
If attackers can compromise AD, they effectively gain entry and privileges to move laterally and deeply without detection. That’s why fragmented security postures, such as hybrid cloud and on-premises setups, are such a risk to enterprise directories. Over time, these governance gaps create inconsistencies and add complexity to environments, with businesses trying to mitigate structural threats from:
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Traditional identity hygiene processes
Businesses may still be using access protocols built for human identity lifecycles, where privileges are manually requested and approved or revoked. The volume of NHIs and their always-on capabilities are beyond manual methods of control, making it impossible to implement a successful principle of least privilege (POLP) model with AD. -
Siloed systems
By accumulating bolted-on solutions, organizations end up applying inconsistent security controls, with irregular audits and governance gaps for malicious actors to target.
Why point solutions make identity debt worse
The sprawling nature of identity debt is often reflected in the sprawling security stack that’s required. There may be separate solutions in place for administrating identity governance and administration (IGA), PAM and AD. Naturally, this increases costs from multiple licenses, plus the expertise needed to maintain each solution.
Without a consolidated identity governance platform, identity debt can soon grow with each solution needing separate identities. And without a single source of truth, admins have no way to know if they should revoke an identity’s permissions. The result is a complex web of identities, with each point solution having its own policies, dashboards and configurations.
The platform case: IGA + PAM + simple identity governance for Microsoft environments
Identity is now a foundation for organizations. It can act as both a business-critical form of defense and a trigger for real-time access to systems, resources and applications. For IT leaders with complex AD environments and multi-product stacks, the question is how to align their disparate architectures securely, while still enabling dynamic workflows.
The answer can be found in solutions like Active Roles by One Identity. Microsoft 365 tenants, AD domains and Entra ID can be consolidated into one console for identity protection, centralized visibility and control, plus hardened security and management. Businesses can extend native tools and streamline Microsoft environments while bridging the governance gaps with least privilege enforcement.
PAM can be integrated through Safeguard by One Identity. This solution operates across all systems, applications and cloud environments with credential vaulting, session monitoring and advanced threat detection. Safeguard can ensure just-in-time (JIT) access, closing off potential governance gaps before attackers turn them into actual breaches.
What’s more, the One Identity platform can integrate with other vendor products. This helps organizations save money by keeping existing identity technologies and enhancing with products like Identity Manager by One Identity, Safeguard and Active Roles. Behavioral analytics provides a way to discover, record and analyze identities without waiting for manual actions.
A practical debt reduction roadmap
Identity debt may be sprawling, but a practical debt reduction roadmap doesn’t have to be. A six-step process covers:
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Discovering
Start with a fundamental truth in cybersecurity: You can only protect what you know you have and what you can see. Audit identities across the full environment — from human to NHI — active and inactive roles, users, teams and resources. -
Categorizing
Group and inventory the findings with priority actions for elevated, standing and other privileges and permissions that are valuable targets for attackers. -
Streamlining
Remove duplicate, dormant and other unnecessary identities, and implement a framework that puts controls in place to prevent a repeat and avoid a potential increase in identity debt. -
Automating
Identify workflows that are currently manual-based. Unless these are for edge cases or strategic decisions, flag these for automation to start reducing the entitlement sprawl. -
Limiting
For priority accounts identified in Step 2, configure as many as possible for access via role-based, attribute-based, or policy-based methods to support POLP enforcement. -
Monitoring
With one single pane in place for visibility, track access to identify unused accounts that may add to identity debt or yield potentially malicious behaviors.
Measuring progress: KPIs for identity hygiene
Solving identity debt means measuring performance across functions such as:
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Identity-based accounts
Assessing how many are unused or dormant compared to those that are active -
Onboarding/offboarding
Tracking the time taken to approve and revoke access when an employee, entity or third party starts work or no longer needs access -
Privileges
Analyzing how many privileged accounts have moved to JIT and POLP models and how many are still standing or indicate privilege creep -
Rotation
Understanding how many identities are meeting the standards for security-related actions, from password rotation and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to meeting adaptive authentication requirements -
Incidents
Determining how manymalicious access attempts were made and how many were flagged as a threat in error
Unifying identity, solving debt
As Gartner points out, when “entrusted with the keys to the kingdom, privileged users require relentless protection.” Identities have to be continually verified, as part of a Zero Trust approach. But identity debt can soon build up without the constant visibility that comes from an integrated solution.
The One Identity platform offers integration to solve identity debt, bringing automated enforcement at the time it’s needed and supporting JIT access strategies across AD, Entra ID and M365. This saves manual time on access management, freeing up resources for use elsewhere in the enterprise.
By simplifying and aligning administration from one central solution, admins can view environments and quickly turn off access and standing privileges for unused or dormant accounts, or trigger reconfirmation requests to owners. Identities can be automatically synced, with changes tracked and anomalous behaviors triggering alerts and actions to mitigate potential breaches.
