With 600 million identity attacks occurring daily1, you'd expect IAM failures to be a technology problem. They're not. At least, not only. The real culprits — organisational complexity, legacy systems, and the absence of a unified strategy — are the ones stalling progress and leaving organisations exposed.

Identity debt is everywhere

  • Over 10% of Active Directory accounts are stale2
  • 31% of identity-related breaches are caused by excessive permissions3
  • Nearly half of security teams lack full visibility of cloud entitlements4
  • Dormant service accounts with admin privileges lurk in over 70% of environments5

This guide maps the identity landscape across six domains — from lifecycle governance and privileged access to cloud identity and threat detection — then gives you a strategic framework built on five imperatives:

  1. Forge a resilient mindset — eliminate single points of failure and build for when, not if, your IdP goes down.
  2. Confront your identity debt — use the included self-assessment to score your organisation's hidden exposure.
  3. Bridge the skills gap — deploy force multipliers like radical automation and repeatable integration patterns.
  4. War-game your defences — run three identity-specific tabletop drills this quarter.
  5. Prepare for the quantum future — begin planning for post-quantum cryptography before it's too late.

Each section includes practical checklists and self-assessments you can act on immediately.

Download the guide, score your identity debt, stress-test your defences, and build a strategy that survives the next outage.

Trusted advice from SHI

This guide was created by cybersecurity practitioners from SHI, including former CISOs, engineers, and researchers who support FTSE 100 and Fortune 1000 organisations every day.

Authors:

  • Andy Adams, Solutions Architect — Security, SHI
  • Phil Armbrust, Senior Director, Presales Engineering, SHI
  • Rob Forbes, Field CISO, Stratascale, SHI’s cybersecurity services division

SHI is a $16B global solutions integrator with premier partnerships across leading cybersecurity vendors, including CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Fortinet, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Wiz, and Zscaler.

SHI’s dedicated cybersecurity services deliver deep expertise across risk assessment, penetration testing, and incident response — combining technical execution with SHI’s global procurement scale.

Download The modern IAM guide

A guide to building resilient IAM programs

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1 Microsoft. Microsoft Digital Defense Report.
2 Microsoft. Regularly check for and remove inactive user accounts in the Active Directory.
3 Tenable. The State of Cloud and AI Security.
4 CyberArk. Identity Security Landscape.
5 BeyondTrust. Identity Security Risk Assessment.