Closing the gaps in your identity lifecycle management strategy
A lot happens during a user’s identity lifecycle. However, many organizations don’t always ensure user identities are securely created, removed and managed.
There are also the risks around compliance violations, insider threats, lower productivity and higher costs from managing sprawling and complex environments. That’s why it’s business-critical to deliver holistic identity lifecycle management (ILM).
What is identity lifecycle management?
From creation to deletion and everything in between, digital identities need to be managed. Whether employees or non-human entities, each identity is likely to need different permissions and access levels throughout their employment. ILM is about provisioning and deprovisioning these demands in a secure, timely, compliant way.
Compliance requirements
Data privacy continues to mature and evolve, putting identity governance at the center of business compliance. HIPAA’s Security Rule requires regulated entities “to implement policies and procedures for authorizing access to ePHI only when such access is appropriate for the user or recipient's role.”
GDPR highlights organizations must “ensure that users access only the data they need, they should be given a unique identifier and should authenticate themselves.” And SOX’s Section 404 audits are for external parties to verify that an organization can “provide reasonable assurance regarding prevention or timely detection of unauthorized acquisition, use or disposition of the company’s assets.”
Some of the changes reflect the always-on culture of modern technology. But when identities also have always-on privileges, multiple security risks appear from both outside and within the perimeter.
1. Insider threats
Several high-profile brands were impacted by identity-related breaches in 2025, with insider threats playing a major part in the attacks. Incidents ranged from shared vendor credentials and IT admin phishing, to ”a disgruntled employee” and a partner’s compromised API key. Of course, not all insider threats are malicious; social engineering is a common vector in an attacker’s toolkit and will target loyal employees as well as disaffected workers. Both may have excessive or lingering access into a business’s systems and accounts.
2. Orphaned accounts
Project managers need their staff to be set up with permissions and resources quickly, often at short notice. However, when the project is completed, those accounts may remain active. Perhaps sensitive data or IP might remain openly accessible, posing compliance risks to the business alongside financial and reputational costs. It’s not only information that grows over time: Privileges tend to grow and sprawl too.
This was shown in an incident involving “a state government organization’s network” reported by CISA, when “an unidentified threat actor compromised network administrator credentials through the account of a former employee—a technique commonly leveraged by threat actors.”
3. Privilege creep
Projects may have involved secondments, temporary promotions or role changes. Naturally, extra or higher privileges will often be needed. Unless set to expire, trigger an alert or be revoked when no longer needed, they can turn into persistent threats.
The risks with a static and non-dynamic approach to granting privileges are doubled. First, it leads to extended privileges stretching beyond the scope of a current user’s role. Second, the privileges may be higher than necessary for their daily duties. Naturally, these scenarios also lead to security gaps that impact strategies for the Principle of Least Privileges (PoLP) or Zero Trust. Tackling these risks involves a set of technologies designed to support ILM.
Leveraging technology to close the gaps
Mitigating the many risks doesn’t have to mean scaling up resources or adding pressure to service desks. It’s more about selecting the right technology to identify risks, find anomalies and minimize human error. Further benefits come from adding automation, predictive tools and centralized visibility. The following solutions show how it works in practice.
Identity governance and administration (IGA)
The list of IGA processes is long, especially at the enterprise level – even longer if teams are still managing identities manually. A company typically implements an IGA solution to centralize identity management across everything from account management and user attestations to identity audits and governance reporting.
User synchronization automatically links sensitive data to individual identities. Account creation can include predefined business logic, where access and permissions are instantly added based on roles, attributes or policies. Updates happen dynamically when an identity’s credentials or authority is changed centrally, or when provisioning and deprovisioning occurs. Further hardening comes from detecting and responding to threats during the identity lifecycle.
Integration with Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR)
With synchronized IGA, less time is taken between threat alert, detection and response. Organizations can build an ITDR framework for monitoring with increased visibility, acting as a security layer with identity as the primary attack target.
User identities and related logs can be assessed and analyzed across on-premises and cloud environments to generate a standard pattern of behaviors. Any deviations from the norm, escalation of privileges or potentially suspicious behavior can trigger real-time alerts. For example, One Identity now offers multiple out-of-the-box playbooks that can deactivate or suspend identities, disable or lock a target system account, or execute approved PowerShell scripts for customer actions. These playbooks are policy-driven, automated response actions that are built directly into Identity Manager and are specifically designed for identity-related threats. The focus here is on response, not just alerting.
Automation and AI-driven analytics
By applying automation, ILM becomes standardized for greater consistency, even as the business scales. Complex processes, such as those spanning cloud and on-premises directories and applications, can stay robust with custom provisioning and notifications.
There’s no need to build custom integrations manually: Changes made in AD get synchronized to downstream applications. And because the sync happens in seconds, businesses gain a kill switch to deactivate any compromised identities.
The importance of strong ILM strategies
Behind the execution of the right technology, the correct strategy delivers benefits across the business: From maximizing speed and efficiency, to staying compliant and being ready for new and evolving attack methods. And with centralized visibility, on-premises and cloud environments can benefit – as long as businesses make use of automation.
Automated provisioning and deprovisioning
Automating involves revoking rights and privileges quickly and accurately at the end of the identity lifecycle, all without waiting for service desk approvals and actions. Predefined rules instead of manual lifecycle management also help avoid siloed processes that may cause inconsistencies for onboarding and offboarding identities.
Ongoing monitoring takes the load off governance teams. Rather than arranging and competing internal audits at periodic times, they gain anytime access to identity-related activity. Changes to permissions are automatically logged, generating auditable evidence to demonstrate standards are being followed, such as with enforcing controls around access and privileges.
Enforced role-based access control (RBAC) and the Principle of Least Privilege
When a new employee joins, their job title might define the permissions their identity needs. However, imagine they get a promotion or move roles. All those permissions, plus any gained for temporary or ongoing projects, now need reviewing and updating, and new or elevated privileges now factor in across an average of 11 apps per employee. Apply the scenario at enterprise level where hundreds of access-related actions may need reviewing.
Faced with such a high workload, adopting role-based access control (RBAC) simplifies access management and reduces risk for ILM. Employees and entities can gain or lose privileges based on role-related assignments. This supports the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP), where the least number of privileges are assigned to the role. It’s also suitable for organizations needing to comply with PCI DSS Requirement 7 where “systems and processes must be in place to limit access based on need to know and according to job responsibilities.”
Requirement 7.2.5 includes application and system accounts, reflecting emerging threats from non-human identities.
Emerging identity threats
Identity itself has emerged as an attack vector, with threat actors impersonating people as part of social engineering attacks. Software company Retool explained how an attacker called a staff member and “claimed to be one of the members of the IT team, and deepfaked our employee’s actual voice.” During the call, the target was persuaded to give an MFA code which led to 27 account takeovers.
The increased volume of AI-based attacks is matched by a rise in adoption velocity, with Gartner noting that “the swift adoption of GenAI technologies by end-users has outpaced the development of data governance and security measures.”
Now that businesses need to operate at the speed of AI, ILM strategies should harness similarly emerging technologies for securing identities. For example, automations can and should be implemented for evaluating login attempts in real-time and triggering step-up authentication when an identity’s attributes are flagged as suspicious, such as by logging in from an unknown device, new location or outside typical working hours. All actions are automatically logged to provide an audit trail when it comes to following identity management mandates.
Audit control and compliance reporting
PCI DSS Requirement 10 has multiple mandates relating to audit logs and documentation, from capturing all invalid login access attempts, to “all changes to identification and authentication credentials.” NIST has similarly diverse security requirements, exemplified by NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 AU-9 (pdf), requiring controls to “protect audit information and audit logging tools from unauthorized access, modification and deletion.”
The high level of granularity underscores the requirement for continuous monitoring to satisfy regulatory requirements and internal governance procedures. An effective plan should monitor all user behavior, identity activity and access updates. When implemented correctly, the attack surface is reduced, vulnerability gaps are minimized and an audit trail is created and controlled.
Closing ILM gaps for transformation and risk reduction
Any gaps in processes can leave organizations vulnerable to modern cyberattacks, especially if an elevated identity is compromised and allows deeper movement across high-value systems at a time when breakout times are “now often under an hour.” The attacker can access and exfiltrate data and continue with the breach, meaning the affected business also risks questions from regulators around compliance.
That’s why the right ILM strategy delivers benefits across the business. The security posture is hardened, with increased visibility and real-time and near-real-time responses to identity-related attacks. Always-on defense generates a continuous record for governance teams throughout identity lifecycles. Increased automation lightens the load on service desk teams and allows organizations to maintain ILM consistently, accurately and at scale. End users and their identities are protected against potential social engineering while maintaining the ability to work at the speeds that modern workplaces and customers demand and expect.
By acting and closing the gaps, organizations can lay the foundations for a mature transformation, mitigating identity-related risks from current and emerging technologies.
