4 Modern Identity and Access Management Challenges & How to Solve Them
Traditional IAM wasn’t built to solve the complexity of identity and access management today. Fragmented environments, skyrocketing non-human identities, and evolving attack techniques are exposing critical gaps in access controls and putting organizations at risk.
In this guide, we dive into four of the biggest challenges in modern identity and access management and how to solve them.
1. Managing a complex and fragmented IT environment
The core modern IAM challenge stems from a simple fact: your identities and resources are no longer in one place. This fragmentation across clouds, SaaS applications, and legacy systems creates significant security and management burdens.
Multi-cloud and hybrid sprawl
Organizations use multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) alongside on-premise infrastructure. Each has its own identity system, leading to inconsistent security policies and a dangerous lack of visibility into who has access to what.
How to solve:
- Centralize identity: Use a primary identity provider (IdP) as the single source of truth for all user identities. By connecting your cloud environments to the IdP, you enforce one consistent and secure way to log in across your entire infrastructure.
- Gain unified visibility: Deploy an identity governance and administration (IGA) or cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) solution. These tools connect to all your environments and aggregate permission data, giving you a single pane of glass to see and manage entitlements everywhere.
SaaS application sprawl
The explosion of SaaS apps creates hundreds of unmanaged identity islands. This leads to insecure password reuse and ghost accounts that remain active long after an employee has left the company.
How to solve:
- Enforce single sign-on (SSO): Connecting all company apps to your central IdP is the solution. SSO eliminates password reuse and streamlines the user experience.
- Automate the user lifecycle: Use the SCIM protocol to automate account creation and deletion. When an employee’s status changes in your HR system, their access to all SaaS apps is provisioned or revoked instantly, closing critical security gaps.
Proliferation of non-human identities
Service accounts, AI agents, and API keys now far outnumber human users. These identities are often overly privileged, use static, hardcoded credentials, and lack clear ownership, making them prime targets for attackers.
How to solve:
- Implement secrets management: Use a dedicated vault to dynamically generate, rotate, and manage credentials for applications and services, ensuring they are never hardcoded and are always short-lived.
Integrating legacy systems
Critical legacy applications often don’t support modern security standards, forcing you to operate insecurely or undertake costly replacement projects.
How to solve:
- Use an identity proxy or PAM solution: Layer modern security onto old applications without changing their code. A proxy can enforce modern authentication before granting access, while a privileged access management (PAM) solution can vault and broker secure connections to administrative interfaces.
2. Defending against evolving security threats
With identity now the primary attack vector, organizations must defend against increasingly sophisticated threats that target users and their permissions.
Identity-based attacks (phishing & credential stuffing)
Attackers are adept at stealing valid user credentials, allowing them to bypass traditional network defenses and log in as legitimate users.
How to solve:
- Enforce strong multi-factor authentication (MFA): This is the single most effective defense against compromised passwords.
- Move towards passwordless authentication: Adopt phishing-resistant methods like Passkeys (FIDO2) and biometrics to remove the password as a point of failure entirely.
- Implement user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA): Use tools that analyze login patterns to flag and block anomalous activity, even if the credentials used are valid.
Privilege escalation
Attackers start by compromising a low-level account and then exploit excessive, unnecessary permissions (“privilege creep”) to move laterally and gain access to critical systems.
How to solve:
- Enforce the principle of least privilege (PoLP): Ensure every user and service account has only the absolute minimum permissions required for its job.
- Implement just-in-time (JIT) access: Replace standing, persistent access with a system where users request temporary, auto-expiring permissions to complete a specific task. This drastically shrinks the window of opportunity for an attacker.
Attacks on IAM infrastructure
The central IAM system is a high-value target for attackers. A compromise here can be catastrophic.
How to solve:
- Secure your administrative accounts: Protect the admin accounts for your IdP with the highest level of security, including phishing-resistant MFA and secure admin workstations.
- Continuously monitor IAM logs: Ingest all administrative activity logs from your IAM system into your SIEM to detect and alert on suspicious changes.
3. Balancing security with user experience
If security measures are too cumbersome, users will find ways to bypass them. A modern IAM strategy must be both secure and frictionless.
Cumbersome authentication processes and security fatigue
Overly complex login processes frustrate users, leading to productivity loss and insecure workarounds like writing down passwords.
How to solve:
- Implement risk-based adaptive authentication: Don’t treat every login the same. Assess the risk of each attempt in real-time and only prompt for high-friction MFA when the risk is high. For low-risk logins, the experience can be seamless and even passwordless.
- Leverage SSO for a better user experience: A robust SSO implementation is a huge win for productivity, reducing login friction across all applications.
Onboarding and offboarding delays
Slow, manual user provisioning delays new-hire productivity, while slow deprovisioning leaves a critical security hole when employees leave.
How to solve:
- Automate the user lifecycle: As noted in the first section, integrating your HR system with your IAM platform to automate onboarding and offboarding is the most effective solution. This ensures secure, instant, and error-free access management from day one to day last.
The passwordless transition
Migrating an entire organization away from the deeply ingrained habit of passwords is a major undertaking that requires careful planning, training, and a strategy for account recovery.
How to solve:
- Take a phased approach: Start with a pilot group and enable passwordless access for the most critical applications first.
- Offer multiple authentication options: Allow users to register several passwordless methods (e.g., a security key and a device biometric) to provide redundancy and simplify account recovery.
- Develop a clear communication and training plan: Create simple guides to walk users through the benefits and the new registration process.
4. Governance, regulatory compliance, and visibility challenges
Proving to auditors that you have control over user access is a monumental task that requires automation and a foundation of visibility.
Demonstrating compliance (for SOX, HIPAA, etc.)
Auditors demand detailed proof of who has access to sensitive data, why they have it, and evidence of regular reviews. Manually collecting this from dozens of systems is nearly impossible.
How to solve:
- Automate access reviews and certifications: Using the visibility provided by an IGA platform, you can completely automate the access review process. The system automatically prompts managers to certify or revoke their team’s permissions, creating an unimpeachable audit trail.
- Establish a role-based access control (RBAC) model, or better yet, attribute-based access control (ABAC): Simplify compliance by grouping permissions into business roles or attributes. This makes it easier to manage, justify, and audit access at scale.
Implementing a zero trust architecture
Zero trust requires that you “never trust, always verify” every single access request. This is impossible without a strong IAM foundation to reliably identify the user and apply a clear access policy.
How to solve:
- Make identity the foundation of your security: A successful zero trust journey begins with a centralized IdP and the complete visibility discussed in the first section.
- Use a dynamic policy enforcement engine: Once identity is managed, a zero trust architecture uses a policy engine to make a real-time access decision for every request based on a wide range of signals: user identity, device health, location, and behavior.
Overcome modern IAM challenges with ConductorOne
With hundreds of cloud services and apps, keeping track of user permissions has become nearly impossible. Traditional IAM solutions can’t keep up, leaving you with security gaps and frustrated employees. ConductorOne is the modern identity access management platform built to solve your identity challenges by replacing slow, manual processes with intelligent automation.
Here’s how we solve your biggest IAM challenges:
- See everything in one place: Connect all your cloud services and apps—from AWS and Google Cloud to Slack and Salesforce. ConductorOne gives you a single, unified view of all permissions, so you finally know exactly who has access to what.
- Eliminate your biggest security risk: Standing privilege is a top target for attackers. ConductorOne helps you implement just-in-time (JIT) access, so employees get temporary, auto-expiring permissions only when they need them. This drastically reduces your attack surface and keeps your most sensitive data safe.
- Grant access in minutes, not days: Stop wasting time on manual IT tickets. Employees can request access directly in Slack, and requests are automatically routed for approval. It’s fast, frictionless, and lets your security team focus on what matters.
- Make compliance audits effortless: Say goodbye to painful, last-minute audit prep. ConductorOne automates access reviews and certifications, creating a complete, time-stamped audit trail. You’ll be ready for your next SOX or HIPAA audit with the click of a button.
Book a demo to see how ConductorOne can solve your identity challenges.
IAM challenges FAQs
What is the difference between IAM, IGA, and PAM?
Think of them as layers of identity security.
- IAM (identity and access management) is the broad foundation, focused on authenticating users (like with SSO and MFA) and determining who they are.
- IGA (identity governance and administration) sits on top of IAM and answers the question, “Who has access to what, and should they?” It handles access requests, approvals, and automates access reviews for compliance.
- PAM (privileged access management) is a specialized tool focused only on securing your most powerful accounts, like administrator or root accounts. It vaults their credentials and brokers secure, monitored sessions.
Why is the principle of least privilege so important?
The principle of least privilege (PoLP) states that a user should only have the absolute minimum permissions required to do their job. If an attacker compromises an account that has least privilege, the amount of damage they can do is severely limited because the account doesn’t have access to systems it doesn’t need.
Isn’t single sign-on (SSO) less secure because it creates a single point of failure?
This is a common misconception. While SSO does centralize authentication, it allows you to fortify that single entry point with much stronger security than you could ever apply to dozens of individual applications. You can enforce strong, phishing-resistant MFA, adaptive authentication, and detailed monitoring on your SSO portal, making it far more secure than relying on hundreds of separate, often weak, passwords.
How does just-in-time (JIT) access work in practice?
Instead of having permanent access to a system, a user goes to a portal (or uses a Slack command) to request temporary access for a specific reason. For example, a developer might request database access for 60 minutes to fix a bug. The request is approved, and they are granted access only for that 60-minute window. After the time expires, their access is automatically revoked. This eliminates standing privileges, which are a primary target for attackers.
Can we implement a zero trust strategy without replacing all of our existing tools?
Yes, absolutely. Zero trust is a strategy, not a single product. You can begin by leveraging the tools you already have. Start by centralizing identity with your existing IdP, enforcing MFA, and using an identity governance tool to gain visibility. You can then incrementally add new capabilities, like identity proxies for legacy apps or dynamic policy engines, to strengthen your zero trust architecture over time.
