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Aug 7, 2025
Top 10 Identity and Access Management Challenges for Enterprises
Yaswanth Kumar Kooraku
Senior Vice President of Technology, Zazz Inc.
Most organizations don’t realize how much identity touches until it breaks. From cloud migrations and DevOps pipelines to hybrid workforces and third-party access, identity has become the connective layer across every IT operation. It’s not just about who logs in anymore. It’s about what users, machines, and APIs can access, when, how, and why.
That’s why leading analysts now refer to identity as the new perimeter, a sentiment echoed across the 2024 Gartner IAM Summit, where identity and access management challenges took center stage. As IAM becomes more critical, it’s also becoming more complex, especially in environments with legacy infrastructure, multi-cloud adoption, and mounting compliance pressure.
In this article, I break down the 10 most pressing IAM challenges facing IT and security leaders today, drawing from expert insights by Gartner, Thales, Oracle, and other industry voices. If IAM security is the foundation of your security architecture, these are the structural weaknesses you need to address now.
1. Multi-Cloud IAM: A Growing Web of Identity Chaos
Managing cloud identity within one cloud is tough. Managing it across AWS, Azure, GCP, and SaaS tools creates even more complexity. Each platform uses its own identity logic, with unique definitions for users, roles, and authentication. The result is a tangle of siloed directories, conflicting policies, and reduced visibility into who is doing what across the cloud identity estate. This is a significant IAM challenge of the modern enterprise.
A unified identity fabric across all environments, cloud and on-premises, is now essential to tackle these IAM challenges. Organizations must centralize identity orchestration and enforce consistent policy layers if they want to reduce audit risk and access sprawl. Solving these IAM challenges is critical to cloud identity visibility and compliance.
2. Lifecycle Gaps: The Risk Behind Joiners, Movers, and Leavers
User lifecycle management, spanning onboarding, offboarding, access changes, and temporary roles, often becomes inconsistent, manual, and dangerously slow. These delays and blind spots aren’t just operational bottlenecks. They’re serious security gaps, highlighting a major IAM challenge.
IAM Lifecycle Component | Common Gaps in Practice | Business & Security Risks |
Onboarding | Delay in provisioning, lack of birthright access | Employee productivity loss, excessive helpdesk load |
Offboarding | Stale accounts, missed revocation of third-party access | Insider threats, compliance violations |
Role Updates | Manual updates, unclear ownership of entitlement changes | Privilege creep, separation of duties failures |
Temporary Access | No auto-expiry or logging for elevated access during projects | Elevated risk surface for lateral movement or misuse |
Enterprises must automate provisioning, integrate Identity And Access Management with HRIS, and enforce contextual policy rules to close these lifecycle gaps in real time. These are fundamental identity management best practices to prevent breaches. Addressing these identity management challenges is critical for robust IAM security.
3. Role Sprawl and Privilege Creep: The Hidden Costs of Static Access Models
In many enterprises, roles are created but never revisited. Over time, employees accumulate unnecessary entitlements, while overprovisioned service accounts become permanent fixtures. This leads to privilege creep, a quiet, invisible, but dangerous security problem. This is one of the most persistent IAM challenges facing organizations.
Traditional RBAC systems can’t keep pace with dynamic access needs. The solution is to move toward attribute-based and policy-based models (ABAC/PBAC) that use behavior, context, and risk to determine access in real time. Dynamic roles reduce exposure and bring IAM security closer to Zero Trust ideals. This is a core part of a strong IAM strategy.
4. Machine Identities: The Fastest-Growing Threat You’re Probably Ignoring
Machine identities now outnumber human users by a wide margin. Yet most organizations have no strategy for managing them. From service accounts and scripts to containers and APIs, these identities often operate with excessive privileges, weak credentials, and zero oversight, posing a massive IAM security risk. This is a critical IAM challenge.
What’s going wrong?
Credentials are hardcoded into scripts or stored in plaintext
Expired certificates go unnoticed
There is no ownership model for service accounts
Machine-to-machine communication lacks auditability
What should enterprises do?
Treat machine identities as first-class citizens in an effective IAM strategy and programs. That means assigning ownership, enforcing lifecycle policies, automating key rotation, and monitoring behavior just like human users. This helps solve these particular IAM challenges. Otherwise, these unmanaged credentials become the weakest links in the entire enterprise security posture. Addressing these identity management challenges is now non-negotiable for true IAM security.
5. Legacy Systems Are Holding Modern IAM Hostage
While cloud platforms move fast, legacy systems remain rooted in outdated protocols and architecture. Many don’t support federation, modern SSO, or even basic API integration. They resist IAM modernization by design and create security black holes in the process, a common IAM challenge.
Instead of ripping and replacing mission-critical legacy apps, organizations should wrap them with modern identity-aware access layers. Using proxies, gateways, or ID federation services can extend IAM security coverage to these legacy assets and gradually phase in IAM modernization without breaking operations. This approach is central to any successful IAM strategy and helps overcome significant IAM challenges.
6. The IAM-UX Tension: When Security Slows Down the Business
Security is only effective when people actually use it. But when IAM controls are clunky or disruptive, users find ways to circumvent them and defeat the purpose of protection. This is a major identity management challenge and a key IAM challenge for user adoption.
Where do things break down?
Multi-step logins and MFA fatigue
Poor mobile UX
Inconsistent SSO experiences
Broken password reset workflows
What can IT leaders do?
Use adaptive authentication to minimize friction for low-risk users
Shift to passwordless methods like biometrics and passkeys
Monitor drop-off points in access flows
Provide seamless SSO for critical systems while limiting exposure
A smooth, intuitive identity experience is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a prerequisite for adoption and strong security, and a pillar of IAM best practices.
7. Underused Identity Telemetry Weakens Threat Detection
IAM systems generate a rich stream of behavioral data, but most organizations fail to integrate it into their threat detection workflows. Instead, identity logs often remain siloed or disconnected from SIEM and SOAR platforms. This reduces the ability to detect early-stage threats like account compromise, lateral movement, or insider misuse. This is a key identity and access management challenge.
To overcome these IAM challenges, enterprises must baseline normal user and system behavior and build anomaly detection around it. Correlating IAM signals with broader security telemetry enables proactive alerting, faster response, and a stronger Zero Trust posture. Smart integration of identity and access management challenges into security operations elevates defense maturity. This is an essential IAM best practice for enhancing overall IAM security.
8. IAM Governance Can’t Keep Up With Enterprise Scale
As enterprises expand, their identity environment becomes more complex with thousands of users, apps, and entitlements. Traditional governance processes like manual certifications, periodic access reviews, and static entitlement mappings become unsustainable. These are significant identity management challenges that require a new IAM strategy. This is a pressing IAM challenge for large organizations.
Effective IAM governance at scale must be automated, contextual, and risk-aware. Instead of relying on checklists, organizations should implement continuous certification workflows, embed compliance into provisioning logic, and apply behavioral risk models to guide access reviews. The goal is not more governance, but smarter governance that keeps pace with scale and regulation. This is a crucial element of a strong IAM strategy.
9. IAM Talent & Ownership Gaps: Who’s Really Driving the Program?
Identity is cross-functional by nature, yet too often, no one owns it end to end. Security teams may set policies, IT teams handle provisioning, and HR manages user data. But no one steers the ship. This lack of ownership is a significant IAM challenge.
Key internal barriers include:
IAM responsibilities are fragmented across departments
No clear program owner or executive sponsor
Lack of internal capability-building or upskilling paths
Overreliance on third-party consultants with minimal knowledge transfer
Limited collaboration between identity, infrastructure, and risk teams
What should leaders do?
Establish IAM as a dedicated function with roadmap authority. Break down silos between HR, IT, and security. Invest in upskilling IAM architects and engineers. Elevate identity as a business-critical capability, not just a technical tool. This shift is essential for sustainable IAM execution.
10. IAM Still Isn’t Positioned as a Core Business Enabler
For many organizations, IAM is still reactive, driven by compliance checklists or security incidents. But leading enterprises understand identity as a strategic accelerator for growth, agility, and trust. IAM modernization is key here.
When IAM is treated as infrastructure, it supports everything from secure DevOps pipelines and global workforce onboarding to customer trust and ecosystem integration. It becomes a foundation for Zero Trust and a catalyst for digital transformation. Addressing IAM challenges proactively is a core part of this.
Identity-first enterprises are not just more secure. They are more scalable, resilient, and future-ready. By aligning IAM modernization efforts with business outcomes, organizations gain a competitive edge. This is the ultimate goal of any successful IAM strategy.
Final Thoughts: Identity Is Now the Business Interface, Secure It Accordingly
Security is no longer just about who logs in. It is about how the enterprise functions. Every user, every machine, every transaction is governed by identity. It is the control point behind it all. Addressing these IAM challenges is a business imperative.
To lead with identity, modern enterprises must:
Centralize IAM strategy and policy enforcement
Treat machine and human identities equally
Integrate IAM telemetry into security operations
Design access with usability, scalability, and risk in mind
Embed IAM governance into business processes, not bolt it on afterward
The future of cybersecurity is identity-first. The future of business is identity-optimized. Solving the many IAM challenges with foresight, technology, and cross-functional ownership is no longer optional; it is a business imperative and a fundamental part of IAM best practices. This strategic focus on IAM security is what ultimately enables secure growth.
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