The Great Identity Disconnect: How Siloed Identity Systems Undermine Enterprise Security

Modern enterprises are operating in an identity environment that’s more complex than ever. The average organization now manages multiple layers of identity tooling from IAM, IGA, and PAM, to NHI security, multiple directory services, and various access management platforms each designed to solve a narrow problem. The result is fragmentation, and fragmentation at the identity layer creates significant risk.

The Mechanics of Identity Sprawl

Identity sprawl isn’t just “too many accounts.” It’s a structural failure in how enterprises monitor what their identities access and correlate those activities back to a single user across complex environments.

Each tool whether it’s Active Directory, PAM, IAM, IGA or an internal LDAP maintains its own depiction of a user, service account, Agentic AI agent or non-human identity (NHI). The result, the same identity can appear as multiple distinct entities (both human and non-human), each with their own set of permissions, accesses and activities, while owned and been operated by the same user or NHI.

Examples are prevalent everywhere:

• A developer has one ID in the corporate directory, another in AWS, and third  in the production environment.

• HR off-boards a user, but a local account in a legacy system persists with admin rights.

• A Human creates thousands of AI agents and NHIs and an organization cannot identify them, understand their access or map them back to how they originated 

Multiply that by tens of thousands of identities human and non-human and you have an IAM framework that’s inherently broken.

Antiquated Layers in a Modern Stack

Identity tooling evolved in isolation. Each generation of systems, weather directories, SSO, privilege management was built to control access within its domain. But enterprise architecture has outgrown these traditional boundaries.

Agentic AI adoption, Complex B2B environments, Hybrid cloud, SaaS proliferation, On-premise environments, workloads and automation mean identities now span environments that weren’t designed to communicate.

The result is an operational paradox: enterprises have more identity tools than ever, yet less unified understanding of their users.

Syncing Isn’t Solving It

Most organizations attempt to bridge these silos through synchronization and configuration of their IAM tools, but unfortunately, syncing isn’t correlation. That’s how one user becomes five separate user IDs across your environment, each with different privileges and ownership rights.

The security implications are obvious:

• Overlapping privileges create unintended privilege escalation paths across systems and environments.

• Shadow Access results in thousands of unknown, unmanaged accounts operating outside directory and PAM governance.

• Identity and Configuration Sprawl amplifies risk by replicating misconfigurations, inconsistent policies, and stale entitlements across multiple identity systems.

  
  

IAM and PAM solutions are strong at setting policies, they decide who can do what. But they’re weak at enforcing the actual activities of identities, unifying identities and correlation, understanding who someone really is across systems. That’s where the visibility gap persists.

Redefining Identity Security with Identity Observability

Closing this visibility gap requires a new operational discipline, identity observability.

Where IAM manages permissions and PAM governs privilege, identity observability provides visibility and correlation. A single identity control plane that continuously unifies identity access and activity data across all identity types (Agentic AI, NHI and human) and all disparate systems, mapping aliases, personal accounts, NHIs and activity back to a single identity.

With identity observability, security teams can:

• Detect users with multiple or inconsistent identities.

• Identify the ownership of unmanaged local or shadow accounts.

• Map Agentic AI agents and NHIs back to the human who created them

• Trace identities access and activities across environments with full contextual linkage.

• Expose privilege bypass before it becomes an exploit path.

As enterprises rapidly move toward agentic AI augmented systems, the need for trustworthy identity observability and correlation only grows. You can’t automate or defend what you don’t know exists. Organizations need to focus on detecting the unknown.