Modern identity security challenges
You can’t secure what you can’t see. One of the biggest challenges in identity security today is unknown unknowns—the identity-related risks companies aren’t aware of or don’t understand well.
For example:
- How many API tokens are floating around in your environment?
- Who has access to what across hundreds of SaaS apps?
- What permissions do your contractors have, and have they ever been reviewed?
Left unaddressed, these blind spots pile up, creating security gaps you may not even be aware of.
Least privilege is broken
Least privilege rarely works as intended because most companies lack the right governance platforms to enable achieving it.
A new engineer joins? Just “copy Joe’s permissions, he’s been here longest.” A user moves roles? Their old access never gets revoked.
It’s the same story with group-based access. Groups can spiral out of control—to the point where no one knows what they do, who’s in them, or if they’re even still needed. Groups become the glue holding identity programs together, and no one wants to remove access for fear of breaking something.
The result? Over-permissioned users, security risks, and compliance headaches.
The explosion of non-human identities (NHI)
NHIs might seem like a new hot topic, but they’ve been around and in your system for years. And today, they outnumber humans 20:1. API tokens, service accounts, certificates—these identities have real access to critical systems, yet companies often struggle to answer basic questions:
- How many NHIs do we have?
- Are any over-permissioned?
- Do we know when they expire or if they need to be rotated?
It’s about to get more complex with the rise of agentic AI—AI systems that act and make decisions independently. With agentic AI becoming more widespread, we’ll soon be treating AI agents just like human employees. You’ll onboard them, Slack message them, assign them access, and need to offboard them when they’re no longer in use.
Managing and governing NHIs will be the next big security challenge, which is why it’s important to start preparing today with a crawl, walk, run approach.
Solving the identity crisis: a crawl, walk, run approach
Between all of these common identity problems, identity security can feel overwhelming. Taking a structured crawl, walk, run approach allows organizations to start with small steps and mature over time.
Crawl: discovery and inventory
You can’t fix what you can’t see. The crawl phase is essentially pulling your entire identity and access universe into one pane of glass—a single source of record that gives you visibility into all the users, NHIs, groups, roles, and permissions in your environment.
Having a central inventory shows you what exists, providing a baseline for you to get ready to walk.
Walk: compliance and baseline controls
Compliance doesn’t equal security, and security doesn’t equal compliance—but establishing some baseline compliance-driven controls will help you achieve a better security outcome. Baseline controls include:
- Role-based access rationalization: Define access levels based on job roles.
- Access reviews: Regularly run reviews for compliance purposes and to identify any issues.
- Streamlined onboarding: Ensure users get the right permissions from day one.
- Self-service requests: Make it easy for employees to request and get the access they need.
With those baseline controls in place, you’re ready to run.
Run: real-time governance
The future of identity governance is automated, contextual, and risk-aware. This includes:
- Automated onboarding and offboarding
- Dynamic role-, attribute, and policy-based access control
- Just-in-time access
- Contextual insights for access approvers
- Automated separation of duties tracking and alerting
- Proactive risk detection and remediation
Doing governance well is about removing friction and adding automation, with security as the ultimate result.
How ConductorOne solves your identity crisis
At ConductorOne, we’re defining what modern IGA looks like:
- Visibility across everything: Centralize identity and access data for every identity type in your environment in one unified control plane.
- Every app covered: Stop losing the app sprawl battle with identity governance across all your cloud and on-prem apps and infrastructure.
- Easy to deploy and use: No 12-month rollout timelines or clunky legacy UX here.
- Contextual and automated: Dynamically adjust access based on roles, attributes, and security policies and automate as much as possible, instead of using static policies, group-given access, and manual workflows.
The future of identity security is automated and built for the modern enterprise. Want to see how it works? Schedule a demo today.
