Organizations plagued by identity sprawl

A new study reveals that identity sprawl is a major problem for organizations, with 60 percent reporting as many as 21 separate identities per user.

The report from Radiant Logic and Gartner Peer Insights looks at the rapid growth of enterprise identity silos, and the explosion of user information, attributes, and credentials that accompanies it.

It shows that an alarming 67 percent of respondents know they have identity sprawl, but don't know how to fully address it. And although 58 percent rated identity management of vital importance, 61 percent state that their business views identity management as too time-intensive and costly to manage effectively on an ongoing basis. Respondents report the most common negative impacts as increased technical debt (66 percent) and negative productivity and morale (64 percent) among employees.

"A lot of times implementations of platforms are done to get to a minimum viable product, with all the intent of going back later and fixing all the little things that aren't working and getting everything sorted out," says Wade Ellery, field chief technology officer at Radiant Logic. "But because the business needs to run forward, it needs to be operational things need to be happening and it needs to respond to the business as quickly as possible from the IT side. So they don't have the time to go back and do all the nice things they’d like to do to the environment and that ends up accumulating over time."

The report also shows 84 percent of organizations reported an identity-related breach and 67 percent experienced one in the last year. What's more 71 percent of those surveyed don't have a budget allocated to identity-based projects, while 35 percent are concerned that they won't be able to protect their organization from identity-based security threats.

Among those threats, 85 percent of those surveyed are concerned about users logging into personal applications with work credentials and have had minimal success preventing it. 71 percent report that the most common user complaint from managing identity is poor integration with new tools and applications and getting help for these issues requires time and resources from support.

"This large pool of individual accounts and credentials is more weight holding back any kind of initiative and really is going to stifle zero trust, you have to address this in a zero trust environment because zero trust is saying, first of all, I know who you are and I can authenticate you effectively with the information I have about you your credential," adds Ellery. "If you don't address this early, even when it's in stage one, it later becomes something that metastasizes throughout the organization and starts to affect almost everything you try and do."

You can get the full report from the Radiant Logic site.

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