What Identity Sprawl Means for Digital Security and How to Address It

Why This Matters

In every enterprise I speak with, identity security is a priority. Teams invest in IAM, request governance improvements and implement stronger MFA policies. Yet almost no organisation can answer one deceptively simple question with confidence: Who can actually access what, right now?

The problem isn't the technology. It's the scale. Azure subscriptions expand. Resource groups grow rapidly. Developers automate new workflows at speed. Acquisitions introduce scores of identities in a single weekend and even more increased complexity.

Each of these actions creates identities that are rarely retired, frequently with misconfigured access permissions and often invisible to central teams. Identity sprawl is not a niche issue or a side effect of poor administration. It is the predictable outcome of digital growth, and one of the most significant blind spots in cloud security.

The Latest Research Shows Scale of the Risk

The extent of identity sprawl comes into focus when you look at the data. Across the industry, the signal is consistent.

• Gartner reports that 50 percent of cloud security failures in 2020 stem from mismanaged machine identities and permissions.
• Microsoft's 2024 Digital Defense Report identifies more than 600 million identity-based attacks every day, with password-based attacks representing more than 99 percent of identity threats.
• The Cloud Security Alliance found that 99 percent of organizations experiencing cloud breaches traced root cause to insecure identities, and one third cited misconfigured cloud services involving non-human identities.
• The Verizon 2024 DBIR, analyzing more than 30,000 incidents, confirms credential compromise as the dominant attack vector.
• NIST and CISA warn that orphaned privileged accounts remain prime targets for lateral movement and privilege escalation.

These findings all point to the same underlying truth. Identity sprawl isn't a background issue. It is the attack surface.

What Is Identity Sprawl?

Identity sprawl is the uncontrolled expansion of identities across digital environments. It includes:

• Human users
• Enterprise Applications
• Managed identities
• API tokens
• Vendor and partner accounts
• External guest users invited through B2B collaboration

On their own, these identities may seem harmless. But at scale, they form an environment where access grows faster than visibility.

A new service principal created for a deployment pipeline today may still have privileged permissions three years from now. A guest user added for a two-week project may hold standing access indefinitely.

Identity sprawl happens gradually, silently and by design. That is what makes it dangerous.

Why Identity Sprawl Accelerates in Microsoft Environments

Azure and Entra ID are designed for flexibility. Teams can create automation, spin up new environments and collaborate externally with minimal friction.

The speed is a strength, but also a catalyst for sprawl.

Multiple subscriptions, tenants and resource groups create complex identity boundaries. Automation pipelines generate new machine identities whenever developers streamline a workflow.

Managed identities are enabled by default in many services. Guest users can be invited by anyone unless organizations explicitly tighten controls. The result is an identity ecosystem that expands continuously and inconsistently. Microsoft-native tools provide valuable insights, but none offer a comprehensive map of identities, permissions and relationships across all layers of the environment.

How Identity Sprawl Creates Invisible Risk

Identity sprawl is dangerous because organizations lose sight of how identities evolve over time. Three patterns appear in almost every enterprise:

Dormant and Forgotten Identities

Service principals created for one-off tasks or automation jobs often remain active, privileged and invisible.

Guest Accounts That Outlive Their Purpose

Azure B2B collaboration introduces external identities that persist long after projects finish.

Privilege Accumulation Without Oversight

Identities gain roles, inherit permissions and become over-privileged as systems evolve.

These factors create ideal conditions for attackers. Traditional IAM tools excel at policy enforcement, but they cannot map relationships or uncover how identities actually interact. This is why sprawl becomes an invisible vulnerability: the risk is woven into the identity fabric itself.

Observable Symptoms Inside Your Organisation

Identity sprawl rarely announces itself. It reveals its existence through operational friction.

Audits take longer than expected because no single source of truth exists. Security teams maintain parallel identity lists that never match. Engineers hesitate to remove old permissions because they cannot see the full impact. Incident investigations slow down because analysts must piece together identity behavior across scattered logs.

These are not isolated issues. They are symptoms of an identity ecosystem that has grown beyond the organization's line of sight.

The Business Impact

The cost of identity sprawl is measured not only in breaches, but in time, uncertainty and operational drag.

• Breach risk increases because attackers rely on dormant or poorly monitored accounts.
• Compliance confidence erodes when access inventories become unreliable.
• Investigation and audit cycles expand from days to weeks.
• Identity data loses credibility, making security programmes harder to execute.

When identity exposure becomes uncertain, every downstream process becomes harder: risk assessments, DR planning, vendor reviews and even board reporting.

Why Traditional IAM Cannot Fix Identity Sprawl

IAM tools were built to enforce policy, not to analyze identity ecosystems. They show entitlements and role assignments, but they do not automatically detect dormant identities, privilege escalation paths or risky privilege overlaps.

They provide answers to "What should this identity have?" but not "What does this identity actually have across all systems?"

That difference is precisely where identity sprawl hides. This is the visibility gap that identity-first security must close.

IVIP: A New Approach to Identity Visibility

Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms represent a shift from governance to understanding. Rather than relying on manual reviews or piecemeal analysis, an IVIP creates a real-time map of every identity, its permissions and its behavior.

An IVIP can:

Continuous Identity Discovery

Continuously discover human and non-human identities across your environment.

Permission and Relationship Correlation

Correlate permissions across tenants and subscriptions to reveal the true scope of access.

Identifying Dormant and Orphaned Identities

Reveal dormant and orphaned identities that create hidden attack surface.

Identify Permission Patterns That Enable Lateral Movement and Escalation Paths

Identify permission patterns that enable lateral movement and escalation paths.

Creating a Single Source of Identity Truth

Provide a single, trusted source of identity truth across your organization.

Where IAM controls access, IVIP clarifies exposure. It is the intelligence layer that makes modern identity security possible.

How to Regain Control of Identity Sprawl

Managing identity sprawl is not a one-time effort. It requires systematic clarity.

Build a Complete Identity Inventory

Start by building a complete identity inventory across Azure and Entra ID.

Map Permissions and Privilege Paths

Then map permissions to see where access accumulates.

Remove Dormant Identities

Identify dormant identities that can be removed safely.

Uncover Toxic Permission Patterns

Analyze role assignments to uncover privilege pathways that enable escalation.

Automate Identity Monitoring

And most importantly, automate monitoring so visibility keeps pace with cloud velocity.

These steps shift identity from a reactive issue to a discipline grounded in truth.

The Future of Identity Security

Identity is becoming the central control plane of enterprise security. Machine identities will continue to grow faster than human users. Collaboration will expand across boundaries. Cloud ecosystems will become more interconnected.

In this landscape, visibility becomes a strategic differentiator. Organizations that understand their identity fabric will navigate risk with confidence. Those that do not will face increasing uncertainty, operational drag and exposure.

The next decade of security will belong to the organizations that can see clearly.