Introduction

Mergers, legacy applications, and decentralized SaaS adoption often lead to fragmented identity systems, which creates disconnected user records that are difficult for organizations to unify. As these silos grow, IT teams face inconsistent authentication flows, increased operational overhead, and limited visibility that weakens both security and compliance.

This blog explores why these issues emerge, the trade-offs between consolidation and governance, and how organizations can determine the most effective path forward.

The Impacts of Identity Silos

Q: What are identity silos?

A: Identity silos are created when user accounts are managed independently across disconnected systems such as Active Directory (AD),Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, legacy applications, and acquired company environments, without centralized governance or visibility. Each system maintains its own version of an identity, preventing organizations from treating a user as a single, unified digital entity.

Q: Why do identity silos increase security risk?

A: Identity silos prevent IT and security teams from correlating multiple user accounts to a single individual across systems. Without that linkage, organizations cannot consistently enforce access policies, reliably detect compromised credentials across platforms, or ensure access is fully removed when users leave. These gaps allow attackers to retain access in overlooked systems after primary accounts are disabled, while security teams lack visibility into the organization’s full attack surface.

Q: How does identity fragmentation impact IT operations?

A: Identity fragmentation forces IT teams to manage access through manual provisioning and deprovisioning across each platform independently. Routine lifecycle tasks such as onboarding new employees, processing role changes, and terminating access require touching multiple systems because automation cannot span disconnected identity repositories. Teams struggle to link multiple accounts to a single individual, leading to duplicate accounts and orphaned access. As more systems are added, operational overhead increases while audit and compliance demands continue to require unified visibility that fragmented infrastructure cannot deliver.

Q: What causes identity infrastructure to become fragmented?

A: Identity infrastructure becomes fragmented over time due to a combination of technical, organizational, and business factors.

• Mergers and acquisitions introduce incompatible identity platforms that are difficult to consolidate quickly.
• Legacy applications such as ERPs, EMRs, clinical systems, and manufacturing platforms often rely on proprietary authentication methods and lack modern APIs, limiting integration with centralized identity providers.
• Business-led IT purchases frequently bypass central governance, resulting in departmental SaaS applications with standalone user management.
• Cloud environments often start small and manually managed, then scale rapidly without automation or governance.
• Platform-specific identity services such as Oracle IDCS for OCI may appear to reduce integration needs, but organizations soon discover they still lack unified visibility and control across systems.
• Even when fragmentation is recognized, technical debt, application dependencies, and resource constraints often prevent consolidation.

Security Challenges Created by Identity Silos

Q: How does identity fragmentation affect breach response?

A: Identity fragmentation slows breach response by preventing security teams from quickly identifying the full scope of compromised accounts. When identities are spread across disconnected systems, responders must manually investigate each platform, delaying containment, and increasing the risk that attackers persist in overlooked environments. Without centralized visibility and consistent logging, organizations struggle to revoke access comprehensively or verify that all attacker access has been fully removed.

Q: What are the compliance risks of identity silos?

A: Identity silos increase compliance risk by preventing organizations from enforcing and proving consistent access across all systems. When identities are fragmented, audits and regulatory obligations are hard to satisfy:

• SOX: Separation-of-duties controls fail when the same individual holds conflicting access across uncorrelated systems.
• HIPAA and FERPA: Requirements for timely access revocation cannot be met when orphaned accounts persist outside centralized deprovisioning workflows.
• CCPA and GDPR: Right-to-be-forgotten and data subject access requests cannot be fulfilled without visibility into every system containing personal data.
• Access certifications: Reviews typically cover only known systems, leaving shadow IT and fragmented platforms remain unreviewed, and creating gaps auditors are likely to flag.

As a result, organizations face audit findings, regulatory exposure, and an inability to demonstrate effective access governance across the full environment.

Managing a Siloed Identity Ecosystem

Q: How do you manage users when you have multiple systems, such as Active Directory and Okta?

A: Managing users across multiple systems such as AD and Okta requires identity governance to correlate accounts belonging to the same individual, enforce consistent policies, and automate lifecycle events across platforms. Without centralized governance, user management remains fragmented, increasing operational effort and security risks.

Q: How do I decide which governance solution is right for my organization?

A: The right governance solution depends on the number of systems you need to manage, whether access governance must span multiple identity providers and applications, and the scope of your compliance requirements. Enterprise identity governance platforms such as SailPoint and Saviynt are designed to provide centralized governance, cross-platform access certifications, and consistent policy enforcement across complex environments. Organizations that are primarily cloud-focused with limited on-premises complexity may rely on Okta's native lifecycle management and governance capabilities to provision AD accounts, synchronize attributes, and enforce terminations without deploying a separate IGA platform.

Q: How do I synchronize identities across multiple cloud platforms?

A: In multicloud environments, platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud each operate their own identity services that don’t integrate by default. Identity governance platforms like SailPoint or Saviynt can provision, manage, and correlate accounts across clouds, linking access back to a single employee and enforcing consistent policies. Organizations often pair this approach with a primary identity provider (IDP) such as Okta or Ping for cross-cloud single sign-on (SSO), while governance tools automate lifecycle events like role changes and terminations across all platforms.

Q: What happens when acquired companies use different identity providers?

A: When organizations acquire companies that use different identity providers, identity fragmentation occurs immediately. Acquired environments often bring their own AD forests, cloud IDPs, HR systems, and application portfolios. Federation can be used to enable SSO across identity providers such as Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, and Ping, allowing users to access resources without consolidating directories. Identity governance platforms like SailPoint, Saviynt, and Veza can manage provisioning, access certifications, and terminations across both environments, maintaining control without forcing immediate consolidation. In some cases, identity abstraction platforms such as Radiant Logic, Strata, or Okta are used to present multiple identity sources behind unified policies and workflows.

Q: Can you use multiple identity governance platforms together?

A: Some organizations run multiple identity governance platforms due to mergers and acquisitions, vendor specialization, or phased modernization efforts. However, operating parallel governance platforms introduces additional fragmentation, including the absence of a unified access view, duplicated certifications, inconsistent policy enforcement, and higher licensing and operational costs. Integration approaches typically involve designating one platform as the authoritative governance layer and synchronizing the other or using orchestration to coordinate workflows across both systems. Because of the ongoing complexity and maintenance burden, this is generally an expensive interim state that organizations aim to resolve through consolidation.

Q: Should you consolidate identity providers or use governance to manage fragmentation?

A: Using multiple identity providers often increases user friction through inconsistent login experiences, MFA requirements, and session behavior, which drives higher password reset volumes and support tickets. Consolidating IDPs can significantly improve the user experience, but it requires migrating and retesting many application integrations, making it a large and resource-intensive effort. Identity governance platforms can manage access, policy enforcement, and compliance across multiple IDPs without requiring migration, but they do not resolve underlying user experience inconsistencies. The right approach depends on application migration complexity, resource availability, and the expected ROI from consolidation versus governance.

Getting Started with MajorKey

Q: How can MajorKey help with complex, siloed identity ecosystems?

A: MajorKey offers strategic, customized M&A advisory services to assess identity risks early and streamline post-acquisition integration before complexity becomes entrenched. MajorKey provides the strategic guidance and implementation services needed to reduce operational burden, strengthen governance, and help organizations regain control of their identity ecosystems.

Get started here.

‍

‍

‍