Identity Security Cannot Be Solved in Silos

You have a densely interconnected web of systems powering your business: solutions like Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta, PingOne, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, GitHub, Salesforce, and dozens of SaaS applications are all woven together to keep your operations running efficiently.While these solutions drive efficiency, they often create fragmented identity security silos. Identities existing across these systems are all part of a single identity attack surface, and they need to be managed that way.

Over the last decade, one thing has become abundantly clear: security needs to start with identity. It’s the front door of a breach, and the more privilege an identity holds, the farther and faster that damage can spread.

Across hybrid infrastructures, human, machine, cloud, and agentic AI identities all continuously request and exchange privileges in real-time. Each of these fast-moving identities carries inherited permissions, privileges, and entitlements—including ones that are exceedingly hard to see or understand—that act as access routes to assets and resources that may be even harder to detect.

Attempting to solve security for this complex, heterogeneous milieu with a series of isolated tools is the equivalent of a security treadmill: lots of effort and sweat, but no true forward movement. And when you slip off, it can be ugly.

Security and IT teams aren’t short on options; they’re drowning in them.A common problem involves fragmented point tools that offer shallow integration, reinforcing identity security silos. When stitched together as suites, performance remains inconsistent, incomplete, and heavily services-reliant.

Without a consistently intentional approach, it’s easy to end up with a patchwork of identity defenses: a point solution for session oversight here, a vault there, a cloud entitlement tool over there, native cloud security toolsets that only work within a single cloud under here, a separate ITDR feed on top, and on, and on. Each tool may be “best of” at a slice, but the slices rarely become end-to-end visibility and control of privilege in all its forms, including permissions, entitlements, and escalation pathways.

For years, leading industry analysts have staked the case that Privileged Access Management (PAM) must converge with Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), Secrets Management, and Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR). This is a vision BeyondTrust was early to embrace and formalize in our roadmap. Organically combining these capabilities (PAM, CIEM, Secrets Management, ITDR) enables teams to discover, monitor, and remediate risky paths to privilege across identities and infrastructure—not just check boxes in separate dashboards, each within its own niche domain.

In our view, identity security silos create three predictable gaps:

1) Visibility gaps

Tools built to observe only part of the identity landscape (point tools), whether native or third-party, see different fragments of the big picture (sessions vs. secrets vs. cloud roles, vs a single cloud / domain, and so on). But they inevitably miss how privileges combine across systems. An identity that appears low-risk in one domain may inherit meaningful power when mapped alongside cloud roles, OAuth grants, SaaS scopes, or nested AD groups. Further, research on passwords and secrets routinely find long-lived, still-active credentials, evidence that discovery and rotation aren’t closing the loop when tools don’t talk. Only a unified identity risk graph can surface these relationships before attackers exploit them.

In the murky math of today’s detection-based metrics, dwell times are reported to be generally decreasing. This seems positive, but could actually be pointing to a more unsettling trend. Aside from ransomware attacks, which quickly make themselves known to exert extortion leverage, it’s quite probable that the increasingly fractured nature of identity environments and solutions means many attacks are just never detected—even for years. All the while, threat actors perform reconnaissance, poison AI models, and siphon off source code, weakening or undermining the business by a thousand unseen cuts.

In today’s hybrid IT and OT environments, cross-domain visibility is critical, because the complexity and pervasiveness of unguarded attack paths are making it a simple series of hops, skips, and jumps for attackers to start in one place, and end up somewhere completely different. Where they pop up may be managed / overseen by a completely different part of the IT organization from where the attacker first gained a foothold. When the activity turns up in a new domain, it may appear just like that of any other identity. Only with visibility into the entire trail and 360-view of that identity’s entitlements and detections can you know otherwise.

2) Policy gaps

Without a single, unified visibility and control plane, managing a hybrid environment with a mix of different toolsets administered by different teams results in policy gaps, inconsistencies, and continual drift.

These gaps show up as:

• JIT being applied inconsistently across domains - a user who has Just-in-Time access (JIT) implemented in one domain, such as Windows and Azure, may have unnecessary and persistent privileges in VMWare, ServiceNow, or legacy environments.

• Endpoint privilege controls being implemented while DevOps secrets are left unmanaged - Privileged credentials and secrets may be centrally managed across Windows and macOS endpoints, while the enterprise DevOps secrets and CI/CD processes remain scattered across pipelines owned by small teams.

• Shadow AI agents operating outside governance frameworks - AI-driven automations or copilots may not be reliably discovered or onboarded, resulting in unmonitored access and uncontrolled privilege inheritance.

• Conflicting identity systems enforcing different rules - Think of all the different inter-connected identity management systems: while one is trying to enforce JIT, another is still granting standing access. It may mean MFA is implemented for some privileged access, but inexplicably, not across a new cloud tenant, where these extra layers of security are just as crucial.

• Breakdowns in the joiner–mover–leaver lifecycle - Policy gaps also materialize as fundamental problems with the joiner-mover-leaver process. For instance, a former employee is removed from AD, but what about their orphaned SSH keys and various cloud admin accounts?

• Agentic AI amplifying privilege drift - An expanding wave of machine identities is only widening policy gaps and related issues. When agentic AI guardrails sit outside your PAM policies, an AI agent can inherit privileges no human would be granted, or keep them longer than intended. Agentic AI has rapidly emerged and proliferated as a new privileged identity class, posing takeover and impersonation risks, if not governed alongside human and machine accounts.

These discrepancies accumulate quietly and create openings that adversaries exploit long before anyone realizes a policy has drifted. Policy is where the problems of unaddressed complexity really show up and translate into painful compliance and auditing challenges.

3) Response gaps

When response gaps exist (and this is the current status quo for most organizations), it can mean something is seen or detected, but not appropriately acted on. For instance, when a compromise is detected, one part of the system rotates secrets, but other important steps, like revoking or tightening access, is never initiated. It can also mean that multiple tools are detecting activity that appears isolated because the tool(s) itself is isolated.

While ITDR solutions have emerged to try to address this response gap, via operationalizing end-to-end identity security defense-in-depth, there are many different starting points and approaches to the discipline. We believe a privilege-centric approach to ITDR makes the most sense, and is ultimately the most effective at reducing risk, closing security gaps, and minimizing response times to achieve effective mitigation. Put simply, modern, converged approaches emphasize one place to detect, decide, and act.

Organizations that approach us to solve the challenges detailed above commonly report experiencing integration debt between sessions, secrets, and discovery—exactly where privilege abuse hides. This also encapsulates why many security programs gravitate toward platforms that natively connect core PAM controls (vault / rotation, session management, secure remote access, JIT) with modern identity security capabilities (CIEM, ITDR, DevOps / NHI, agentic AI).

How BeyondTrust enables you to effectively manage your identity estate as ONE attack surface:

• Comprehensive Discovery and Ongoing Visibility – Provides visibility into everything around identities: Not just “who” but what (services, agents, pipelines) and where permissions combine into exploitable paths. Provides cohesive visibility, paired with an AI/ ML intelligence layer, to see the full picture of what’s happening with an identity and its access, what it means, and what must be done to reduce identity security risk.
  

• Response and Remediation - When anomalous privileged behavior is identified, it automates the fix. Auto-remediations can include expiring tokens, rotating secrets, pausing or terminating sessions, tightening access controls, adding more approvals to access workflows, to name a few. Visibility seamlessly translates into mitigations through the same plane of control.

• Continuous Validation - Measures residual risk (e.g., over-entitled human identities or NHIs, stale credentials, shadow admins) and shows a measurable reduction in that risk, quarter-over-quarter, to support your audit preparation actions.

Our conversations with customers and industry analysts reinforce this direction: identity security improves when discovery, decisioning, and remediation operate as one system spanning domains.

Autonomous or semi-autonomous agents introduce novel privilege risks—from impersonation to over-permissioned tasks—especially when they hold secrets or call sensitive APIs. If you bolt AI controls onto the side of your security infrastructure using point products, you’ll recreate the same visibility and policy gaps you fought in cloud and DevOps.

The “solve” is to treat AI agents as first-class identities governed by the same privilege controls and continuously monitored.

As a multi-discipline identity security leader with a true platform, BeyondTrust is the vendor best poised to help you address the fragmentation and silos that undermine identity security in practice.

Our Pathfinder Platform unifies the comprehensive gamut of PAM use cases with modern identity control requirements (PAM, CIEM, ITDR, DevOps/NHI, and AI Agent Security) into one policy and telemetry plane. It gives you the most cohesive approach to see, understand, and address identity security risks and gaps.

With Pathfinder, customers are finally primed to manage their entire identity estate as one, singular attack surface. See, harden, and mitigate issues from AD to Okta, from Azure, to Google, to GitHub and Salesforce, and beyond. Identity security and access intelligence is carried cleanly across boundaries, from one domain to the next, so you can truly understand, share, and act on risk across your organization.

The outcome is continuous, measurable risk reduction across human and non-human identities, cloud and on-prem, even as your IT footprint expands and your organization embraces new technologies.

Shadow AI is already operating inside most organizations — often with more access than anyone realizes. BeyondTrust’s expanded Identity Security Risk Assessment now illuminates these hidden AI and NHI risks as part of your broader identity security posture.

Get your complimentary Identity Security Risk Assessment and see where attackers would move first.