Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform (IVIP)
What is an Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform (IVIP)?
An Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform (IVIP) aggregates, correlates, and analyzes identity data across the enterprise to provide unified visibility, contextual risk intelligence, and actionable insights into identities, accounts, privileges, entitlements, and access relationships.
It consolidates data from diverse sources, such as identity infrastructure (e.g., Active Directory, Okta), DevOps tooling (e.g., GitHub, Cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure), SaaS tools (e.g., collaborative tools like Slack, ITSM tools like ServiceNow, orchestration tools like Ping DaVinci), and other security solutions, including Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) solutions.
Additionally, IVIP can map entitlement, account, and configuration relationships, uncovering indirect connections that could lead to privilege escalation that was otherwise hidden or unknown. IVIP capabilities provide the foundational visibility and intelligence layer for Identity Security programs. For instance, Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) solutions depend on the contextually rich and clear insights of IVIP to effectively harden defenses and rapidly respond to threats.
Why Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms Matter
Identity visibility and intelligence platforms are an emerging solution area in response to the explosion of types and numbers of identities across domains that must be properly monitored and secured. In particular, non-human identities (NHIs), including service accounts, AI agents, and API keys, are multiplying at an unprecedented rate. For example, BeyondTrust’s Phantom Labs™ research team reported on a 466.7% year-over-year increase in AI agents operating inside enterprise environments. Other prominent research has stated that NHIs outnumber human identities by more than 80:1.
Without a centralized view of enterprise identities and how they obtain and use privileges and entitlements, organizations are at heightened risk of identity-based threats. Some of the most common identity-based risks include:
Excessive privileges, caused by misconfiguration or privilege creep
Toxic access combinations that can enable higher privilege permissions than intended
Hidden privilege pathways that cross domains, so may not be well understood when looking at a single domain in isolation
Orphaned and rarely used accounts
Standing privileges that are not properly revoked in line with least privilege principles
Exposed privileged credentials, such as passwords, accounts, keys, or secrets
How IVIP Works – Key Steps
IVIP works by connecting multiple disparate identity sources into a centralized intelligence layer that is usable by IAM and security teams across the organization. It typically uses AI to power its intelligence engine. Key IVIP capabilities and steps include:
Ingestion: Connects to a variety of identity data sources via connectors and other integration frameworks. Then, IVIP ingests the data to pull information on users, groups, accounts, entitlements, privileges, cloud identities, SaaS identities, service accounts, workload identities, API tokens, secrets, AI agents, etc.
Normalization and correlation: Transforms these heterogeneous data sources into a unified data model by correlating common attributes.
Relationship mapping: Maps the connections between domains, including every entitlement and escalation path for human, workload, agentic, and machine identities. It’s important to not just map which access was granted through intentional, direct provisioning, but also which actual paths to access and entitlements exist via indirect or hidden escalation paths.
Risk scoring: Leverages analytics to detect issues such as overprivileged accounts, inadequate security controls, dormant credentials with standing access, etc., and then ranks them by severity and impact.
Downstream use by IAM and security teams: Displays these findings in a user-friendly format, such as a dashboard or graph, making it straightforward for teams to visualize identity-related issues that are surfaced by the platform, and then take clear next steps for remediation.
Reveal, visualize, and understand hidden Paths to Privilege™ within your existing environment using our free, award-winning Identity Security Risk Assessment. Get started today.
IVIP vs. IAM, IGA, PAM, CIEM, ISPM, and ITDR
IVIP supports adjacent identity and security disciplines by centralizing and enhancing visibility and intelligence. However, it’s important to note that it complements, rather than replaces, each of these other disciplines. In the table below, see how IVIP compares to and complements, IAM, IGA, PAM, CIEM, ISPM, and ITDR.
Category | Primary Function | What It Answers | How It Relateds to IVIP |
|---|---|---|---|
Manages authentication, authorization, and user access to systems and applications. | Who has access, and how is that access granted or revoked? | IVIP adds cross-system visibility into identity relationships, privileges, and risk signals that IAM data alone may not show. | |
Manages how identities are provisioned / de-provisioned, how access is requested, how roles are managed, and how access is reviewed across the organization. | Who has access to what, which permissions do they have, why do they have it, and does this level of access align with policies and compliance standards? | IVIP analyzes identity activity signals from across domains, to better understand how identities are actually being used in daily workflows. This extended visibility can shed light on identity-related risk that falls outside the purview of an IGA solution. | |
Discovers, controls, protects, and monitors privileged accounts and access. | Who has privileges and are they being used properly? Are privileges provisioned on a just-in-time basis (exactly when they are needed, and then revoked afterwards)? | IVIP reveals the full picture of privilege, including indirect or hidden escalation paths that span domains. These indirect pathways to privilege escalation are often not under the control of a traditional PAM by default, and must first be discovered. | |
Discovers and manages cloud / SaaS permissions and entitlements. Can streamline controls across different clouds (multicloud environments). | Are the cloud permissions, entitlements, and activities of entities operating within appropriate access controls? | IVIP can correlate cloud entitlement data with other identity data sources, such as on-premises environments, identity infrastructure, and more. By connecting these separate domains, IVIP can detect risks that originate from outside cloud / SaaS environments, but connect back to how cloud identities are being used. | |
Continuously assesses and hardens security posture of identities and their access across environments by identifying exposures, misconfigurations (lack of MFA, etc.), and excessive privileges. | How secure is our identity posture, and where are we exposed? | IVIP serves as the foundational data and intelligence layer on which effective ISPM depends. ISPM complements IVIP as a decision and action layer. It takes the visibility and context from IVIP and uses it to evaluate, prioritize, and operationalize remediation of identity-based risk. | |
Detects identity-related threats in real time, as well as flagging areas with weak identity security practices and offering next steps for proactive remediation. | Are real-time identity signals pointing to a vulnerability that can be fixed proactively or a threat that needs to be contained reactively? | IVIP provides the foundational visibility and intelligence ITDR relies on. ITDR, in turn, leverages this context to detect, respond to, and remediate identity-based attacks, while also feeding telemetry and insights back into IVIP to continuously strengthen the overall intelligence layer. |
Common IVIP Use Cases
IVIP enables teams to find and mitigate many common identity risks, such as orphaned accounts, excessive privileges, toxic access combinations, hidden privilege paths, standing access, exposed credentials, and unmanaged service accounts.
Here’s a breakdown of each of these risks, and which signals an IVIP solution would use to find them:
Use Case | Example of Risk Signal Found by IVIP |
|---|---|
Identify orphaned accounts | An account remains active after the user, workload, or service no longer needs access. |
Minimize excessive privileges | An account is maintaining privileges after the job or task that required them has completed. |
Mitigate toxic access combinations | A digital identity has multiple permissions or access rights that, when combined, could cause a severe threat to the organization. |
Reveal hidden escalation paths | An ostensibly low-privilege user actually has the ability to gain higher privileges because of misconfigurations, group memberships, lack of clarity around how roles are defined, etc. |
Remove standing access | An identity maintains high-privilege access to a sensitive system for an indefinite amount of time. |
Identify exposed credentials | A privileged credential is stored in plaintext within some technical documentation. |
Find unmanaged service accounts | A service account was created for a specific purpose, but continues to operate with high privileges that go beyond the scope of its original purpose, and has no clear owner. |
Examples of Identity Questions IVIP Can Answer
By consolidating and enriching identity data from across domains, an IVIP can flag these types of risks, answering key questions such as:
Which of my non-human identities (NHIs) have standing administrative access to production cloud environments?
Which user accounts haven't authenticated in 180 days, yet still hold privileged entitlements?
Which service account, if compromised, would give a threat actor lateral movement across my entire footprint?
IVIP for NHIs: Machine Identities, Service Accounts, and AI Agents
IVIP is especially important for securing NHIs such as service accounts, workload identities, API keys, secrets, machine identities, and AI agents. Non-human identities pose unique risks to enterprises. There may not be a clear owner of the NHI, and it may have less defined lifecycle and security controls (MFA, etc.). as compared to human identities.
AI agents can pose significant visibility gaps, as they're often over-privileged by default to ensure they work without friction, and then are set to operate autonomously with little to no oversight.
IVIP helps to secure these non-human identities in the following ways:
Visibility: Scans multiple / many domains, such as cloud environments, on-prem directories, CI/CD pipelines, and endpoint processes, to reveal unmanaged NHIs and what they can access.
Intelligence: Provides clear visualization of how each of these NHIs access privilege and what they can actually do via transitive trust relationships, misconfigurations, etc. IVIP goes a step further with AI agents and also leverages intelligence that gauges the intent of AI behavior: is every agent acting within its scoped agency, or is it accessing unusual or unexpected tools / resources that do not align with expected intent?
Protection: Puts risk in context, including offering guidance on next steps for securing NHIs and human identities, such as rotating a credential or restricting permissions by amount or duration.
BeyondTrust’s Identity Security Insights® is the leading IVIP solution. Our customers use it to illuminate every human and non-human identity’s True Privilege™, and operationalize clear next steps for improving identity security posture and responding to threats. Learn more about Identity Security Insights here.
FAQs
IVIP stands for Identity Visibility and Intelligence, which refers to an identity visibility and intelligence layer that helps IAM, IT, and security teams unite data from siloed identity sources. IVIPs illuminate identity relationships, access, risk, and activity across IAM, cloud, SaaS, privileged access, machine identities, and AI agents, so teams can make better-formed decisions to improve identity security.
Identity Visibility and Intelligence consolidates identity data to reveal the identities, accounts, privileges, relationships, risk, and activity across systems. It helps teams understand how human and non-human identities gain, hold, and use access across enterprise environments.
IVIP correlates identity data from across the organization, including information on users, groups, accounts, entitlements, privileges, cloud identities, SaaS identities, service accounts, workload identities, API tokens, secrets, AI agents, etc.
It pulls this data from siloed sources such as identity infrastructure, DevOps tooling, cloud infrastructure, SaaS tools, PAM and CIEM solutions, and more.
IAM manages identity access (“who has access”), while IVIP helps security teams understand identity context around that access, including relationships, privileges, risk signals, and activity across IAM and adjacent systems (“what can an identity do with its access”). IVIP enhances, rather than replaces, IAM.
No; IVIP supports PAM, IGA, CIEM, ISPM, and ITDR by providing them with a rich, identity intelligence and visibility layer. It does not replace existing controls. Rather, it helps teams correlate identity data and clarify risk across adjacent identity security disciplines, so that they may better harden identity posture and remediate threats.
Machine identities and service accounts can hold access that crosses domains, leading to visibility gaps. IVIP matters because it helps teams identify these identities, correlate their privileges, and spot risks such as excessive / standing access, orphaned machine / service accounts without clear owners, and hidden escalation paths.
IVIP helps with AI agents by treating them as identities whose access, activity, and relationships need visibility. It uses identity data from across the organization to understand which effective privileges an AI agent has. This is an important part of securing AI agents because they’re often given broad, standing access by default to ensure they work properly, and often exist as shadow IT outside the purview of other identity security tools. By clearly flagging each agent’s effective privileges, including privileged paths that cross between domains, IVIP can help organizations proactively find and protect identity-based risk that stems from agentic AI.
IVIP can provide visibility and insights into risks such as excessive privileges, toxic access combinations, hidden or indirect privilege paths (including those that cross domains), unused or orphaned accounts, standing privileges, and exposed privileged credentials. These risks can increase the likelihood of lateral movement or privilege escalation.