Why Identity Teams Must Show ROI and How Identity Observability Makes It Possible

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is quickly becoming one of the most important and heavily scrutinized areas of cybersecurity. At this year’s Gartner IAM conference, one message stood out across sessions, analyst conversations, and hallway discussions: identity teams are under mounting pressure not only to accelerate identity-first security, but to clearly demonstrate the organizational ROI and operational efficiencies that their identity investments deliver.

CISOs, business leaders and even boards increasingly expect identity programs to not only ensure seamless adoption and access of technologies, but to justify spend, optimize tools, and show measurable outcomes. However, many identity teams struggle to show a meaningful story due to the fact that their environments are fragmented, their visibility and intelligence is incomplete, and their metrics are tied to reactive work rather than proactive value.

This challenge is amplified by what many organizations now face: The Great Identity Disconnect, which is a structural gap caused by scattered identity systems managing the different aspects of identity security across agentic AI, NHI, and human users. With data fractured across IAM platforms, SaaS apps, directories, cloud services, and security tools, identity teams are dealing with inefficiencies and unfortunately cannot easily articulate the value they bring to the enterprise.

Identity Visibility and Intelligence, or Identity Observability, helps solve this challenge by providing real, continuous insight across the entire lifecycle of identities (agentic AI, NHI and human), what they access, how they access it and how they are behaving across the entire environment. But more importantly, it bridges the visibility and intelligence gaps in today’s identity environments and empowers identity teams to report clear, defensible ROI while driving meaningful operational improvements.

The following best-practice areas illustrate where identity programs can consistently deliver measurable financial ROI and organizational efficiency gains.

1. Hard Savings: Removing Direct Costs Hidden in Identity Fragmentation

SaaS Rationalization Based on Actual Usage

A modern identity program should illuminate not just who is able to access a SaaS application, but who actually does. This is where most organizations are able to uncover some of their largest, quickest returns.

Best practice: Use observed identity access and activity versus generic vendor-supplied usage reports or spreadsheets to:

• Consolidate redundant SaaS applications

• Identify overlapping SaaS tools

• cleanup Shadow IT and reduce organizational risk

• Rationalized, evidence-based licensing consolidation

  
  

This usage pattern based approach transforms license management from guesswork into measurable savings.

Identity Sprawl Cleanup Across All Identity Types

Identity sprawl in the form of dormant accounts, duplicates, orphaned users, unmanaged service accounts, and untracked AI agents, quietly inflates costs year after year as organizations pay for unmanaged seats across multiple, isolated systems.

Best practice: Continuously discover and reconcile disconnected, unused or unmanaged identities across agentic AI, NHI and human accounts.

Identity Observability helps reduce identity sprawl from:

• Improper off-boarding

• Duplicated or legacy identities

• Misaligned entitlements

• Over-provisioned automation or service accounts

  
  

The financial value is immediate: organizations stop paying for identities that should no longer exist in their systems.

Unused License Optimization

Teams often overspend on licenses as they rapidly adopt business applications and GenAI tools.  This license proliferation often outpaces actual usage, causing unnecessary spend on unused licenses.

Best practice: Match allocated licenses with real identity access and activity to determine:

• Who is not using assigned tools

• Which features or tiers are unnecessary

• Where renewals can be trimmed or right-sized

  
  

This keeps the software budget aligned to active, value-generating users, not assumptions based on roles.

2. Soft Savings: Operational Efficiency and a more Secure Identity Ecosystem

Freeing the Identity Team from Manual Work & Correlation

When logs and context are reported on in different silos or teams, investigations turn into multi-hour efforts. Teams spend more time correlating than solving.

Best practice: Adopt a unified view of identity access and activity, across agentic AI, NHI, and human identities to:

• Accelerate investigations

• Reduce duplicate work

• Improve hygiene with proactive insights

• Free up senior engineers for strategic initiatives

  
  

These operational efficiencies act as “soft savings” that compound as efficiencies over the identity program’s lifecycle.

Reducing Identity-Related Support Tickets

Account lockouts, password resets and misconfigurations can dominate IT support queues. Each incident wastes time for both IT teams and the end user.

Best practice: Provide identity teams with contextual observability so they can:

• Reduce support calls

• Save costly work hours for IT teams

• Ensure efficiencies with quick resolution for end users

  
  

Fewer support tickets means fewer disruptions and more productive employees across the organization.

Strategic ROI: Risk Reduction and Future-Ready Identity First Security

Beyond the aforementioned direct cost savings, another strategic value of identity observability is its ability to reduce manual effort, increase operational efficiency, and significantly lower the likelihood of identity-driven breaches.

Traditional IAM tools often miss critical gaps such as:

• Shadow or unsanctioned accounts

• Forgotten service or automation identities

• AI agents that self-provision or accumulate privileges

• Cross-system entitlement drift and privilege anomalies

  
  

Unified identity observability allows organizations to protect from these blind spots, allowing teams to prevent issues rather than react to them. This not only strengthens the organization’s security posture but also removes the manual task oriented work that slows identity teams down.

The result is a more efficient identity operation where risk reduction becomes a meaningful, measurable part of the identity team’s output.

Conclusion: Turning Identity into an Enabler for Measurable Return

Identity teams now operate in an environment where demonstrating ROI is as essential as enforcing security. The organizations that succeed are those that:

• Rationalize SaaS based on real usage

• Eliminate identity sprawl

• Optimize licenses proactively

• Improve team efficiency through unified visibility

• Reduce support ticket loads

• Strengthen their posture against identity-driven threats

By embracing these practices, organizations transform identity from a fragmented operational initiative into a measurable business accelerator  that delivers financial returns, reduces risk, and positions the enterprise for a future defined by agentic AI, NHI and human identities.