Inside the Growing Problem of Identity Sprawl

Why Identity Life Cycles, Visibility and Privilege Are Falling Out of Sync Pooja Tikekar (@PoojaTikekar) • January 12, 2026

Identity still works in most enterprises. Employees authenticate. Applications connect. Automated processes run without interruption. But security teams increasingly describe a more troubling condition: Certainty in identity management is disappearing.

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Traditional models for governing identity, built around predictable human life cycles and review cycles, are buckling under the weight of modern enterprise complexity. Practitioners and researchers blame it on identity sprawl: a systemic drift in how identities are created, used and governed across digital environments.

Across cloud platforms, development pipelines and automation frameworks, identities are created, used and discarded at a pace governance models were never designed to handle. Many of these identities are not human. They belong to services, APIs, workloads and increasingly autonomous systems that appear and ...