As Identity Becomes the New Security Perimeter, IGA Becomes Essential

It’s 3 AM when your phone rings. On the other end, your security operations team delivers news every executive dreads: “We’ve detected a breach. Ransomware has been deployed across multiple systems.” As you rush to understand the scope, the questions come fast. How did they get in? What systems are compromised? How many accounts are affected?

The answer to that first question cuts deep: a contractor who left the company six months ago still had active credentials. Their account, never properly deprovisioned, became the entry point. Now your team is scrambling to understand the blast radius while encrypted systems multiply by the minute.

The Visibility Crisis

This scenario isn’t hypothetical. It reflects the harsh reality facing security leaders. Identity-based attacks now account for roughly 30% of all cyberattacks, representing one of the most significant and growing threats to enterprise security.

What makes this threat so dangerous is that most organizations can’t see their identity attack surface. That contractor’s orphaned account, the ransomware spreading across systems, the scramble to understand the scope; these are all symptoms of systematic invisibility.

According to Gartner®, security risk management has overtaken compliance as the primary driver for IGA adoption. IAM professionals now view identity as the core foundation of cybersecurity posture. The reason is stark: traditional security has a blind spot, and attackers are exploiting it ruthlessly.

You Can’t See Who Has Access

74% of organizations have users with unnecessary access and overly permissive accounts. Entitlement creep occurs when you don’t have full visibility into who has access to what across your organization. Here’s how this happens:

Sarah joins as a marketing coordinator with access to the content management system and collaboration tools. Six months later, she moves to product management and gains access to product roadmaps, customer data, and internal development systems. After another year, she transitions to a sales engineering role with access to customer environments, technical documentation, and demonstration systems. At no point does anyone remove her previous access rights.

Not because they forgot, but because nobody can see what she’s accumulated. Her marketing access lives in one system, her product access in another, her sales engineering access in a third. Her Active Directory permissions are somewhere else entirely, and her cloud entitlements are scattered across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Each move added access. Nothing ever came off.

This pattern affects the vast majority of organizations. Service accounts created for specific projects run indefinitely. Contractor accounts persist long after engagements end. Privileged users maintain elevated access “just in case.” Each unnecessary entitlement expands your attack surface, and research shows that nearly all damaging cyberattacks involve privileged account exploitation.

You Can’t See What They Can Reach

When that contractor’s credentials were compromised in your 3 AM scenario, the next question is how far can the damage spread?

This is the blast radius problem. A service account with elevated privileges across multiple cloud environments, on-premises systems, and SaaS applications becomes a superhighway for attackers. Once they obtain those credentials, they inherit all those permissions and can move laterally across systems, accessing sensitive data, modifying configurations, creating backdoors, and exfiltrating information across your entire infrastructure.

Without comprehensive visibility into identity relationships and access patterns, you cannot accurately assess the blast radius. Your team spends days reconstructing what systems the account touched, what data it could access, what other accounts it interacted with, and which cloud resources are exposed. Every hour of investigation is another hour of attacker dwell time. Every system missed in forensics is another potential foothold they maintain.

You Can’t Keep Up

The attack surface is expanding faster than ever, and most of it is invisible to traditional security tools.

Attackers are leveraging AI to accelerate their campaigns. Organizations face deepfake attacks using AI-generated audio and video for social engineering. Phishing emails powered by large language models arrive grammatically perfect, contextually relevant, and incredibly convincing. But the real AI threat isn’t just enhanced attack techniques, it’s the explosion of AI tools within your own organization, creating identities you don’t know exist.

Every GenAI application, every AI agent, every automated workflow creates new identities that require governance. Many exist outside traditional IT visibility, creating gaps attackers exploit.

Your marketing team may have deployed a GenAI tool last week without IT approval or security review. That tool now has API access to your customer database, your content management system, and your email platform, authenticated with a service account holding more privileges than most of your executives. Your SIEM doesn’t see it. Your firewall doesn’t see it. Your DLP doesn’t see it. A threat actor who compromises that vendor’s API keys sees everything.

Shadow AI is breaking corporate security from within as employees deploy tools that bypass security controls entirely. Machine identities such as service accounts, API keys, OAuth tokens, containerized workloads, and RPA bots now outnumber human identities in most organizations. These non-human actors access sensitive systems, hold privileged credentials, and create attack vectors that traditional IAM tools struggle to govern.

The Blind Spot in Your Security Architecture

The cybersecurity paradigm has fundamentally shifted, but most security architectures haven’t caught up. Cloud adoption, remote work, SaaS proliferation, and mobile access dissolved the traditional network perimeter. Your employees, contractors, partners, machines, and AI agents now access critical resources from anywhere, at any time, across dozens or hundreds of different systems. The castle-and-moat model that protected enterprise resources behind network boundaries has become obsolete.

This decentralization created a new reality: identity is now the security perimeter. Gartner® describes this as identity-first security: an approach that makes identity-based controls the foundational element of cybersecurity architecture.

But most security stacks can’t see this new perimeter. Your firewall sees network traffic, not identity relationships. Your SIEM sees events, not entitlement patterns. Your endpoint tools see devices, not access across systems. Your DLP sees data movement, not who should have access in the first place. None of them can answer: Who has access to what? What can they reach if compromised? How did these entitlements accumulate?

This is precisely why identity-based attacks have surged while perimeter breaches have become less common. Attackers don’t need to break through your firewall when they can steal legitimate credentials and walk through the front door.

Identity Governance Is the Control Plane for Identity Security

Identity Governance and Administration provides the crucial visibility layer in your current security stack. IGA aggregates identity data from every corner of your environment, such as active directories, cloud identity providers, HR systems, SaaS applications, and databases into one unified view that answers the fundamental question: Who has access to what right now?

See Your Entire Identity Attack Surface

The contractor’s orphaned account that caused the 3 AM breach? Automated identity lifecycle management prevents exactly that scenario. When that contractor’s engagement ends, IGA revokes their access across all systems within minutes. The attack vector closes before anyone tries those credentials, eliminating the weeks-long window that manual deprovisioning creates.

Sarah’s entitlement creep illustrated earlier? Access certification surfaces it immediately. IGA automates certification campaigns, and Identity Analytics enhances them by surfacing high-risk entitlements for priority review. AI flags the anomalies, privilege escalations, and toxic combinations that require immediate attention. Regular attestation prevents entitlement creep before it becomes a security gap.

Understand the Blast Radius Before the Breach

IGA shows which identities connect to which resources, which service accounts have elevated privileges across multiple environments, and where the lateral movement paths exist. Identity Analytics examines these patterns continuously, identifying anomalies, scoring risk, and surfacing insights impossible to detect manually.

Rather than discovering which accounts pose the greatest risk during an incident, Identity Analytics proactively identifies high-risk identities, over-privileged accounts, and unusual access patterns. A service account suddenly accessing systems outside its normal pattern, or an executive account showing login attempts from an unusual location at odd hours; these anomalies become early warning signals rather than post-breach forensic discoveries.

When a compromise happens, you know instantly what that identity can access. Security teams prioritize remediation based on actual risk. Incident response teams understand scope and relationships immediately, rather than spending days reconstructing access patterns reactively.

Govern Identity at Machine Speed

Modern IGA platforms bring machine identities under the same governance framework as human accounts. When a new AI workflow or containerized workload spins up, IGA provisions its identity, grants access based on policy, and issues certificates automatically. When that workflow is decommissioned, access is revoked immediately across all connected systems.

The automation operates continuously. Credentials rotate on schedule without manual intervention. Access reviews flag machine identities with excessive privileges. Risk scoring identifies service accounts operating outside normal patterns. All deployed applications are discovered, cataloged, and governed like any employee account.

From Vulnerability to Visibility

Identity has become the battleground where cybersecurity is won or lost. Every day without comprehensive governance increases your exposure to breaches, ransomware, and over-privileged access that expands the blast radius. AI is accelerating both attacks and attack surface expansion at machine speed while most organizations discover threats at human speed.

This reality is reinforced by Gartner®, which, in its 2025 Market Guide for Identity Governance and Administration, highlights the importance of adopting identity-first security strategies within cybersecurity programs. Organizations taking this approach are better positioned to act proactively rather than reactively in managing cybersecurity risks.

The choice is clear: continue with manual approaches that cannot scale to meet modern threats, or implement identity governance as the foundation of your security architecture.

Organizations that embrace comprehensive identity governance transform from being reactive victims into proactive defenders with the visibility and controls required to protect their assets. They will be able to answer “who has access to what” in seconds, not days. They will understand blast radius before breach, not during forensics.

Purpose-built for Security Governance

Omada Identity Cloud is a cloud-native platform designed specifically to address the security challenges facing today’s organizations. It provides the scalability, resilience, and rapid deployment required to govern modern hybrid environments while maintaining the security controls that enterprise organizations demand.

The platform supports hundreds of application connections through diverse API capabilities, enabling comprehensive governance across cloud platforms, SaaS applications, on-premises systems, and hybrid environments. You gain control across your entire identity fabric.

AI-Powered Analytics That Find Risk Before Breach

Omada’s Identity Analytics transforms raw identity data into actionable intelligence. AI-driven analysis continuously learns from access patterns to surface risky entitlements, identify anomalies, and refine role definitions automatically. Omada’s AI capabilities help security teams focus limited resources on the highest-priority risks among thousands of potential issues.

Rapid Deployment That Delivers Security Value Quickly

Implementing IGA shouldn’t require years-long projects while your attack surface remains invisible. Omada’s 12-week Accelerator Package provides a guaranteed path to a production-ready governance framework. Core integrations, role models, and governance capabilities are deployed with training and a tailored roadmap, enabling organizations to realize security benefits quickly.

Zero-Knowledge Architecture That Protects Your Identity Data

The Cloud Application Gateway creates secure bridges between Omada’s cloud platform and your systems using outbound-only connections. Your firewalls never need to allow inbound traffic. All sensitive identity data is encrypted before leaving your environment and can only be decrypted with keys under your control. This design minimizes exposure to ransomware and data breaches. Your identity governance data never becomes an attack vector.

Real-World Impact

Organizations using Omada Identity Cloud gain the visibility they need to transform their security posture. They discover undocumented access across their environments, close contractor and service account gaps through automated lifecycle management, and surface high-risk entitlements through AI-enhanced access certification.

Security doesn’t stop at visibility. It extends to how governance data itself is protected. The platform’s zero-knowledge architecture provides critical protection. Even in breach scenarios, encrypted identity data remains unreadable without customer-controlled decryption keys, transforming IGA from a governance tool into a defensive security control

Ready to move from vulnerability to visibility? See how Omada Identity Cloud can help you close security gaps, reduce blast radius, and achieve comprehensive identity governance. Schedule a demo today and discover why leading enterprises trust Omada to make their identity attack surface visible, manageable, and defensible.