That 70% Breach Statistic? It’s Not Elite Hackers, It’s Your Own Dormant Accounts.

The problem isn’t complex cyber-attacks, but “poor identity housekeeping”. The three most common entry points are:

• Orphaned Accounts: An employee leaves, but their account stays active for weeks, becoming a wide-open back door.
• Excessive Permissions: An employee moves from marketing to finance, gaining new financial access while their old marketing permissions are never revoked. This “access creep” creates unnecessary risk.
• Slow Offboarding: The manual process of deprovisioning an employee is so slow that the security gap remains open long after they’re gone.

The Cure: Four Pillars of Modern Identity Governance

Solving this “poor housekeeping” problem—and addressing 80% of the risk—comes down to four fundamental pillars of modern Identity Governance and Administration (IGA):

1. Automate Everything: The entire “joiner-mover-leaver” process must be automated. No human should be manually ticking boxes in Active Directory when someone is hired or changes roles.
2. Clean House Regularly: Mandate regular (e.g., quarterly) access certifications. This forces managers to review and justify their team’s access, asking, “Does Bob really still need this?”
3. Standardize Access: Stop granting permissions one by one. Use Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to create standard access profiles for specific jobs.
4. Connect to Everything: A modern IGA system must be able to communicate with every application in the ecosystem, whether it’s a new cloud app or a critical legacy system from 1998.

This last point is often the biggest hurdle. Many organizations are held back by critical old systems that have no modern API, making them seemingly impossible to govern.

From Poor Housekeeping to Bank-Grade Governance

To solve this, organizations need to automate and govern the entire identity lifecycle. This is the core function of i-Sprint’s Universal Identity Manager (UIM).

UIM is built on the AccessMatrix technology, a “bank-grade” foundation that has been stress-tested in the world’s most mission-critical environments for 25 years. This rock-solid core allows UIM to securely automate the joiner-mover-leaver process from end to end.

From the moment HR clicks “Hire” in a system like Workday, UIM works in the background. Before the employee’s first day, their accounts for Active Directory, M365, Salesforce, and other systems are provisioned and ready. More importantly, when an employee leaves, those same accounts are disabled in near real-time, completely closing the security gap.

Tangible Wins: From Days to Hours, Months to Weeks

The impact of UIM goes beyond just security, delivering massive productivity and compliance wins.

• Productivity Win: A global financial firm transformed its three-day, paper-based marathon for onboarding a new hire. After UIM, a new employee is fully provisioned in under an hour.
• Compliance Win: A public sector agency that faced a three-month, all-hands-on-deck panic for its annual ISO 27001 audit now runs a simple report. What was a frantic 3-month effort is now a two-week calm review.
• Efficiency Win: A manufacturing conglomerate drowning in access-related helpdesk tickets cut those tickets by 60% after implementing UIM, freeing their IT team to focus on innovation instead of just being gatekeepers.

The Future of Identity: Intelligent and Automated

The UIM platform is moving from manual to “intelligent governance”. The future includes AI-powered role mining, where the system analyzes access patterns to suggest optimal, low-risk roles, eliminating guesswork.

And for those stubborn legacy systems from 1998 with no modern API, UIM is building an RPA-based connector. This will use a robotic process to log in and manage accounts, finally bringing every application into the governance fold.

For organizations feeling overwhelmed, the path to start is clear: pick quick wins like HR and Active Directory, form a coalition of HR and IT, and use the out-of-the-box templates to show value fast.