What’s Being Missed by PAM and IGA Solutions

Introduction 

You’ve invested heavily in navigating your security landscape. Your Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) solution is your city planner, drawing the approved roads for user access. Your Privileged Access Management (PAM) tool acts as your armored transport, ensuring access is secure, passwords are rotated, and sessions are recorded. Yet, attackers are bypassing these systems. In some cases, they actually target these systems. They’re slipping through unlit alleyways, exploiting overgrown shortcuts, and using forgotten service tunnels you never knew existed. 

The problem isn’t your tools; it’s your map. Traditional PAM and IGA provide critical but incomplete views of your identity terrain. Moreover, identity security tools create a data problem, as each collects and operates on only the data relevant to its specific function, leaving no single tool with a complete picture. This fragmentation prevents tools from providing the context needed for optimal remediation decisions. To truly defend your organization, you need to see the entire attack surface—every identity, every connection, every hidden path. This blog provides the cartographer’s view, charting the dangerous territories that don’t appear on standard PAM and IGA maps and explaining how a complete view of the identity landscape is no longer a luxury, but a mission-critical necessity.

The Identity Visibility Crisis

Traditional PAM and IGA tools rely on periodic scans and static policies to manage identities. This approach worked when the landscape was predictable, but in today’s sprawling hybrid-cloud world, it creates dangerous gaps. The result is an incomplete and perpetually outdated map leading to:

• Blind spots: Dormant, shadow, or unmanaged identities persist unseen in unmapped territories. 
• Lagging visibility: Changes in privilege or configuration create new attack paths that go undetected for days or weeks. 
• Fragmented identity data: Identity sprawl across AD, cloud providers, CI/CD tools, and local application accounts on legacy applications escapes unified management, leaving you with a patchwork of disconnected maps. 

Recent breaches underscore a fundamental truth: the perimeter hasn’t failed; our maps have. Attackers are winning not by breaking down the front door, but by walking through it. In some cases, the door is unlocked, and in other cases it is locked but they’ve found the key. 

The Dangers You Can’t See

Even in mature security deployments, PAM and IGA platforms struggle with the following: 

1. Unmapped Territory: Ephemeral and Shadow Identities Containers, serverless workloads, API keys, and temporary access grants often live outside of standard provisioning workflows. PAM can’t vault what it doesn’t discover, and IGA doesn’t track these short-lived identities in non-directory systems. This vast, unmanaged wilderness is the first-place attackers explore for easy entry points. These systems often require hundreds, thousands, or even millions of lines of custom code to support the systems customers want to integrate
2. Hidden Highways: Cross-Domain Attack Paths Attackers chart routes from on-prem to cloud, expanding their radius to move laterally and locate systems of value. PAM and IGA rarely map these complex identity relationships or track effective permissions across disparate systems, leaving these hidden, high-speed highways wide open for exploitation.
3. Shifting Landscapes: Privilege Creep Elevated roles often persist long beyond their intended time, violating the principle of Zero Standing Privilege. IGA tools rely on manual, scheduled access reviews that quickly become stale, like a map that doesn’t account for recent construction. This “privilege drift” means the security landscape is constantly changing without your knowledge.
4. Forgotten Ruins: Risk of Legacy Systems PAM and IGA deployments often skip critical systems that lack modern APIs or connectors to integrate. These legacy applications become forgotten ruins on your map, harboring dormant, default, or hardcoded credentials that are prime targets for attackers,

Building the Complete Map: The IASM Difference

A modern Identity Attack Surface Management (IASM) approach rethinks the problem entirely by creating an always-on inventory of every identity—human and machine—and how it behaves. Here’s how it works: 

• 🔍 Continuous Discovery: Real-time detection of identities across all your terrain—SaaS, cloud, and legacy systems. It maps every account to its owner and flags stale, duplicate, or orphaned accounts that represent uncharted risk. 
• 🔐 Privileged Access Observability: Continuously monitors privileged accounts and their protections. It identifies misconfigured group memberships and privilege escalation paths, effectively adding elevation data to your map. 
• 🧠 Behavioral and Event Monitoring: Tracks identity usage patterns, permission changes, and anomalous behavior, providing the real-time “traffic data” on top of your static map. 
• 🕸 Unified Identity Relationship Graph: Maps all potential attack paths across domains, systems, and account types. This helps security teams visualize the “blast radius” of any compromised identity, showing exactly how far an attacker could travel from any given point. 

Thinking Like an Attacker

Traditional IAM assumes you know what to protect. IASM flips the script—it asks, “How would an attacker read our map?” By continuously identifying and scoring exposures (like unvaulted privileged accounts or cloud admin tokens), IASM lets defenders see the landscape through an attacker’s eyes and remediate weaknesses before they’re exploited. 

Recommendations

Security and IAM teams should: 

1. Continuously survey your entire terrain across all identity stores, not just your core identity directories.  
2. Enhance your PAM and IGA tools with an integrated IASM approach to close visibility and remediation gaps. 
3. Chart all identity relationships across systems to uncover and eliminate toxic combinations 
4. Explore the “wilderness” by treating machine and ephemeral identities with the same scrutiny as human accounts. 
5. Analyze the “blast radius” to understand the true impact of any identity being compromised 

Conclusion

PAM and IGA are not broken—they are essential tools that are operating perfectly based on maps that are now decades out of date. They were designed for a world of clear perimeters and predictable infrastructure. Today’s sprawling, fluid, and hyper-connected environment demands a new kind of cartography. 

It’s time to move beyond the limitations of legacy maps. An Identity Attack Surface Management platform doesn’t replace your existing tools—it augments them—by giving them a complete, modern map to work from. It illuminates the entire ecosystem, restores visibility, and finally gives you the control to secure the routes you never even knew existed.