The Cost of Tool Sprawl for Privileged Access

In October 2025, ESG published research that put a number on something identity teams have been feeling for years. The average enterprise runs 11 separate tools for workforce identity security alone. This morass of identity includes IGA, PAM, Password Management, ITDR, CIAM, Access Management, Workload Identity...I think you get the picture. The same study found that 44% of organizations run multiple PAM tools, and 45% run multiple password management tools.

Meanwhile, the Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that stolen credentials remain the most common initial access vector, accounting for 31% of all breaches. Attackers aren't breaking through firewalls. They're logging in. When tools responsible for governing the most critical access simply don't talk to each other, these logins either go undetected altogether or are undetected for much longer than they should be.

The real cost of identity tool sprawl goes beyond licensing fees and duplicated integrations. It's the gaps between tools where privileged access goes ungoverned, standing privileges persist, and remediation breaks because a change in one system doesn't propagate to the next.

https://research.esg-global.com/reportaction/515202106/Marketing
https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/

Key concepts

• Enterprise identity teams use an average of 11 workforce identity security tools, with 44% running multiple PAM products simultaneously.
• Disconnected identity tools let attackers exploit credential abuse, the top initial access vector in 31% of breaches.
• Privileged access requires one platform governing identity and privilege together, not more tools.

What drives identity tool sprawl?

Identity tool sprawl is the result of reasonable decisions compounding over time.

AWS and Azure offer native IAM capabilities, so teams adopt them alongside whatever they were already running on-premises. Cyber insurers increasingly require specific controls like MFA and privileged access management, so organizations layer on point solutions to satisfy policy requirements. And each new SaaS application or cloud platform introduces a separate access model, a separate admin console, and another set of privileged accounts to manage.

The result is multiple overlapping tools that can only see a slice of the identity environment on their own, with no system capable of answering the basic question of who has access to what at any given time. In the permissions-based world of privileged access, these failed handoffs often compound into greater risk.

How tool sprawl turns privileged access into a liability

When IGA and PAM operate as separate systems, the handoff between them breaks down. IGA handles user provisioning and access reviews. PAM handles credential/secret vaulting and session management. Deciding who should have privileged access, for how long, and under what conditions? This requires the context of both systems. In practice, what this actually means is that this handoff depends on manual processes, brittle integrations, and a whole lot of duct tape..

The result is three distinct failures that create an insecure chain of events.

1. Standing privileges persist. PAM lacks the lifecycle awareness to know that an admin or third party’s role changed three months ago, so the risk stays active indefinitely.
2. Orphaned service accounts accumulate. IGA has no visibility or management into PAM-managed credentials and secrets, and no visibility over privileged sessions, so the system doesn’t know they exist.
3. Remediation stalls during incidents. Revoking access in one system doesn’t cascade to the other. According to IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, breaches involving compromised credentials took an average of 246 days to identify and contain.² That's more than eight months of exposure from credentials that should have been revoked.

Omdia research quantified the operational burden. A single critical identity-related security alert takes an average of 11 person-hours to investigate and remediate. That timeline stretches further when the investigation requires correlating data across consoles that were never designed to work together.

Fixing the problem only gets more complicated as the environment scales. Non-human identities (NHIs), including service accounts, API keys, and AI agents, now outnumber humans in most enterprise environments. The NHI management group estimates that there are between 25 and 50 times more non-human identities than human users in enterprise environments. These NHIs carry broad, long-lived privileges and rarely go through formal access reviews, and without a unified governance model, they remain invisible – ghosts in the machine.

Why Zero Standing Privilege fails without convergence

The three failures above make it structurally impossible to achieve Zero Standing Privilege, the security model where no user maintains persistent administrative access.

ZSP requires tight, real-time coordination. When a user requests elevated access, the system needs identity context (role, justification, risk score, physical context) to determine whether to approve. Once the task is complete, access should be automatically revoked. This continuous workflow must ensure that standing privileges have not and cannot accumulate anywhere, and necessary privilege is accessible just-in-time. Each of these steps depends on governance and privilege management operating as one system, not two.

Without unity, the integration between the systems becomes the weakest link. Custom connectors require ongoing maintenance. Shared schemas break when either product is updated. Engineering cycles go toward keeping the integration alive instead of improving security outcomes.

This is why we need to shift the conversation from reducing tool sprawl to adopting a new approach to privileged access.

What convergence changes about privileged access

The identity industry is converging because the existing model is broken. Privileged access is an identity problem, not a vaulting one. When identity governance and administration and privileged access management share one platform, the three pitfalls described above resolve themselves.

• Lifecycle and Just-in-Time access. The full lifecycle of privileged accounts (creation, approval, usage, ownership, and decommissioning) runs through one workflow. When someone's role changes, their privileged access changes with it. The platform evaluates each request against organizational policy, provisions temporary credentials or secrets, and revokes them when the session ends.
• Visibility and risk prioritization. Security teams get a complete view of human users, non-human identities, and AI agents, along with the privileged access each holds. Identity Security Posture Management makes this actionable by continuously assessing risk and prioritizing what to fix first.
• Operational simplification. For existing IGA customers, extending into PAM eliminates the integration tax. Target applications are onboarded once, and practitioners work in one console. No second data store to reconcile, no connector maintenance draining engineering cycles. And no more wasted time going through manual processes between disparate silos, finding information, attaining approvals, and fixing overlapping privileges.

Is convergence realistic for every organization?

Consolidation doesn't mean rip-and-replace overnight. Most organizations have years of investment in their current identity tools, and legacy PAM systems have deep roots in enterprise infrastructure.

The practical path starts with understanding what you already have. Many enterprises have existing tool features they've never fully used, and chances are high that vendors have capabilities to cover the use cases you’ve been addressing with separate, point solutions. Auditing the current stack and identifying overlaps are the first steps to reducing sprawl without a full platform migration.

For organizations ready to modernize, the critical question is whether your platform was built as one system or assembled piecemeal. A natively converged platform means IGA and PAM share the same identity warehouse, the same policy engine, and the same risk model. While products that were bolted together through integration are inherently more fragile (and over time, less cost effective) due to the separate data stores and synchronization lag that drove the consolidation decision in the first place. Your architecture determines whether you can achieve Zero Standing Privilege or just talk about it.

Frequently asked questions about PAM and identity tool sprawl

Your next read: PAM and IGA Convergence By Design (Not Acquisition)

https://nhimg.org/nhi-challenges