Identity is now the largest, fastest moving attack surface. Every user, app, service account, bot, and AI agent represents a potential entry point. Without strong identity governance, organizations face real security exposure, real compliance gaps, and real operational burnout.
Here are the biggest risks teams take on when identity governance falls behind.
Excessive access creates attack paths
When employees, contractors, or service accounts accumulate access over time, privileges stack up in ways no one intended. Over-permissioned accounts become perfect starting points for adversaries who only need one compromised credential to move laterally.
Excessive access can lead to:
- Privilege creep that silently expands risk
- Unmonitored entitlements in critical apps
- Easier escalation paths for attackers
- Larger blast radius if an identity is compromised
Strong identity governance enforces least privilege by design. Without it, you’re essentially building an expanding map of attack routes through your environment.
Manual UARs create compliance risk
User access reviews are non-negotiable for nearly every modern compliance standard. And when they’re done manually, the actual security benefits of completing UARs breaks down fast.
The risks of conducting manual UARs:
- Incomplete or inaccurate access data
- Reviews based on outdated spreadsheets
- Managers rubber stamping because they lack context
- Missed revocations that show up during audit testing
Too often, the goal of UARs are the same: get through the audit, check the box, move on. The bar to “pass” is often pretty low. But that doesn’t mean your UARs should be.
By automating your UAR processes, you get a lot more than check-the-box compliance—you can have real security outcomes in addition to cutting hundreds of hours of manual effort.
Access sprawl multiplies misconfiguration risk
The more apps, integrations, and identities you have, the harder it becomes to keep access consistent and correct.
Weak governance leads to:
- Shadow IT that no one knows how to review
- Orphaned accounts that never get deprovisioned
- Misaligned roles across systems
- Inconsistent permissions that create hidden vulnerabilities
Misconfiguration is one of the fastest growing identity threats. Access sprawl without governance only accelerates it.
You can’t govern what you can’t see
If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times: you can’t govern what you can’t see. If you don’t have a central, real-time view of access across your apps and infrastructure, you cannot manage risk effectively. And you definitely can’t respond when things go wrong.
Lack of visibility causes:
- Unidentified privilege escalation
- Unknown high-risk accounts
- Blind spots during incidents
- Slower investigations
Good governance starts with a complete, unified inventory. Without it, everything else is guesswork.
Higher stakes: the AI identity explosion
If the above risks weren’t enough to convince you why strong identity governance is more important than ever, maybe this will: it’s not just human identities or service accounts that need to be governed. Soon, if they aren’t already, AI agents will be acting across every layer of the business.
Every model, script, workflow, and integration needs permissions. Many will request more access than necessary. And without strong governance and monitoring, they’re operating without oversight, without context, and without auditability.
Weak identity governance in an AI era introduces risks that didn’t exist just a few years ago:
- Hard-to-track non-human identities with powerful, persistent permissions
- AI agents making access decisions or taking actions without human review or audit logs
- Exploding numbers of credentials, secrets, and API keys
- Faster lateral movement if any agent or credential is compromised
- No clear ownership for revocation, lifecycle management, or policy enforcement
This isn’t just doubling the attack surface, it’s 10xing it. Let’s make this concrete:
Take a 1,000 person company today. Traditionally, they might have a few hundred SaaS apps, a manageable number of service accounts, and users who each have a stable set of roles.
Now add AI agents. Every core business application is building its own agent. Think:
- A Salesforce AI agent managing pipelines
- A GitHub AI agent reviewing code
- A Confluence AI agent summarizing knowledge
- A Helpdesk AI agent resolving tickets
- A Finance AI agent reconciling spend
- An HR AI agent completing onboarding workflows
And that’s before we factor in personal productivity agents, like email copilots, research and summarization agents, and workflow automation bots that each individual employee is using. Each of these agents is an identity that will request or inherit significant permissions.
A 1,000 person company could suddenly be managing hundreds of thousands or even millions of AI agent identities annually, depending on how AI-driven the business becomes.
Legacy IGA and manual governance processes cannot scale to this world.
Strong identity governance isn’t optional
The organizations that stay secure and audit ready share one thing in common: they treat identity governance as an operational imperative. With modern tools, automation, and clear policies, companies can reduce risk, improve compliance, and give IT and security their time back.
Companies that don’t modernize their identity governance now will be overwhelmed by the tidal wave of AI agents entering their environment. By building an AI-native identity governance program today, you can prepare for the scale that comes with the AI era.
When identity is the most critical security perimeter, weak governance becomes your biggest vulnerability.
If you want help building strong, automated identity governance, ConductorOne can show you where to start. Book a demo.
