The Unseen Realm of Digital Identities
Digital identity management has evolved beyond simple directories or single portals. Today, identities are spread across numerous platforms, including SaaS, on-premise systems, IaaS, PaaS, custom-built applications, and even shadow IT. Each environment often maintains its own set of accounts, permissions, and authentication methods.
Traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) tools typically manage only a fraction of these identities – those fully integrated and mapped. A vast, unmanaged portion remains invisible, encompassing unverified, non-human, and unprotected identities, collectively referred to as identity dark matter.
Integrating new or updated applications into a managed identity system requires substantial effort, including connectors, schema mapping, entitlement catalogs, and role modeling. This often consumes significant time, resources, and expertise. Consequently, many applications are never fully onboarded, leading to fragmented, ungoverned identities and permissions.
Beyond human users, an even greater challenge exists with non-human identities (NHIs).
APIs, bots, service accounts, and AI agents interact and operate across IT infrastructure. These entities are frequently untraceable, created without clear ownership, oversight, or proper lifecycle management, even within managed applications. Such ungoverned entities represent the deepest and most hidden layer of identity dark matter, a segment that traditional IAM tools were not designed to address.
Key Elements of Identity Dark Matter
As organizations modernize their IT environments, the identity landscape fragments into several high-risk categories:
- Unmanaged Shadow Applications: These are applications operating outside formal corporate governance due to the complexities and costs associated with traditional onboarding processes.
- Non-Human Identities (NHIs): This rapidly growing category includes APIs, bots, and service accounts that perform actions without adequate oversight.
- Orphaned and Stale Accounts: A significant number of organizations report having over 1,000 orphaned accounts, and approximately 26% of all accounts are considered stale (unused for more than 90 days).
- Agent-AI Entities: Autonomous agents that execute tasks and grant access independently, challenging conventional identity management models.
The Security Implications of Identity Dark Matter
The proliferation of ungoverned identities creates substantial security blind spots, fostering an environment where cyber risks can flourish. In 2024, dormant credentials, including orphaned and local accounts, were implicated in 27% of cloud breaches.
The primary risks associated with identity dark matter include:
- Credential Abuse: Exploitation of credentials accounts for 22% of all breaches.
- Visibility Gaps: Organizations cannot effectively manage what they cannot see, leading to a false sense of security while risks escalate.
- Compliance and Response Deficiencies: Unmanaged identities fall outside audit scopes, hindering compliance efforts and slowing down incident response times.
- Concealed Threats: Identity dark matter can obscure lateral movement, insider threats, and privilege escalation within a network.
Addressing the Challenge: From Configuration to Continuous Observability
To eliminate identity dark matter, organizations need to transition from configuration-centric IAM to evidence-based governance. This shift is facilitated by Identity Observability, which offers continuous visibility across all identities.
The Orchid Perspective suggests that future cyber resilience relies on a three-pronged approach:
- Comprehensive Visibility: Gathering telemetry directly from every application, not just through standard IAM connectors.
- Verifiable Audit Trails: Establishing unified audit trails that clearly document who accessed what, when, and for what reason.
- Ubiquitous Governance: Extending control mechanisms to encompass managed, unmanaged, and agent-AI identities.
By integrating telemetry, audit data, and orchestration, enterprises can transform hidden identity dark matter into verifiable and actionable insights.
The Orchid Security Approach
Orchid Security believes that robust cyber resilience requires an identity infrastructure that functions similarly to observability for compliance and security. This involves understanding how identity is coded, utilized, and behaves.
Through the unification of telemetry, audit, and orchestration, Orchid empowers enterprises to convert obscure identity data into actionable truth, ensuring that governance is not merely claimed but demonstrably proven.
