Identity Visibility: How Organizations Can Gain More Transparency into Their Digital Identity Estate

“What I don’t know can’t bother me.” In identity security, that is a dangerous mindset. When there is no transparency into identities, companies can quickly find themselves in serious trouble: what you do not know, you cannot control. Organizations should therefore not downplay current challenges such as fragmented identity data, non-human identities (NHIs), and the lack of visibility into identities, but instead uncover blind spots as systematically and as quickly as possible. The goal is greater visibility for full control.

Where Does the Identity Truth Reside?

This question is becoming increasingly difficult for decision-makers to answer. Identity has undergone a shift: from a static construct to a highly dynamic system. Today’s IT landscape—made up of cloud environments, software-as-a-service, directory services such as AD, Entra, and LDAP, logs, SIEMs, and IAM and IGA systems—is a major reason why. Identity data can no longer be consolidated in a single place; it is created, changed, and put to use across numerous systems.

As a result, anyone looking at just one system sees only part of the truth. This makes it much harder to understand the relationships between identities and permissions. Login behavior and actual usage remain opaque. The interconnectedness of systems, combined with the speed of change, often means organizations can no longer answer even basic questions with confidence. It is no longer just unclear which identities exist, but also who or what is logging in where, which services are being used, and in what context. Questions around timing, frequency, permissions, and actual usage also often remain unanswered.

Individual pieces of information may exist, but where access originates, how it is inherited, or how it is actually used often remains a mystery. This becomes especially apparent with non-human identities: an organization may know that a technical identity exists and has certain permissions, but often not when it is actually being used, which services it is allowed to access, or which of those services it truly uses in day-to-day operations. Yet precisely this knowledge of usage patterns and metadata can make the decisive difference in how early an attack is detected—or whether it can even be automatically stopped.

Visible identities are in short supply. As a result, companies cannot be certain that these identities are protected; it is much more like a gamble.

The Problem Intensifies with NHIs

This gamble has become even riskier in recent months—with the rise of non-human identities. On average, there are now around 82 technical, non-human identities for every human identity. And that number is likely to grow further. These include machine identities, service accounts, API keys, and automated processes. What sounds like operational convenience is, in the absence of transparency, above all one thing: a vulnerability.

These identities often operate automatically and with persistent privileges—and without any real oversight. In many cases, there is no clearly defined owner, and unnecessary overprivileging only increases the risk. Organizations that are effectively operating in the dark run the risk of compromised technical identities moving through systems unnoticed.

Companies should therefore watch for these signs of opaque identities and, by extension, unprotected access:

• There is no clear overview of identities—whether human or non-human.
• Relationships and permissions exist only in fragmented form. There is no complete picture.
• Hidden or unclassified accounts are difficult to identify.
• It is unclear which identities are actually using which services. Questions such as “Who is allowed to use certain services, and who is actually using them?” cannot be answered.
• Contextual information about usage is missing. In other words, organizations cannot see from which network, through which client environment, or with which authentication methods access typically takes place—and therefore cannot reliably assess how trustworthy or anomalous that access is in a given context.

If even one or more of these statements applies to your organization, it is time to act.

Visualizing Identity as a System

Retail offers a useful analogy here: inventory-taking. Before identities and access can be managed—which is what an IAM system is designed to do—organizations first need clarity on which identities exist and where. That requires collecting and correlating identity and permission data. Anyone who assumes this is just another form of traditional monitoring is mistaken. IVIP-oriented approaches (Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform) do not focus only on isolated events, but above all on the relationships between identities, permissions, access paths, and situational context such as time of day, network, or client environment.

Three characteristics speak in favor of modern identity visibility and intelligence platforms:

1. A Unified View of Identities

As we have already seen, identities are spread across multiple systems. IVIP brings together all identities, accounts, roles, and permissions—both human and non-human—into one consolidated model. This gives decision-makers a complete identity inventory.

2. Graph-Based Visualization of Access Relationships

Seeing identities is one advantage. Understanding their web of relationships is another. That is why modern IVIP approaches use real-time identity graphs to reveal effective permissions, inheritance paths, escalation paths, and indirect access. This makes it possible to answer quickly and reliably who can access what, and through which path.

Complex and previously hidden relationships also become visible—including potential attack paths that had gone unnoticed before.

3. Thinking Like an Attacker

IVIP looks beyond the obvious. In addition to the current state (“What is configured?”), it also uncovers risks in context. This requires a shift in perspective toward the kinds of questions an attacker would ask: Where do exploitable paths exist? Which accounts enable lateral movement? Where do privilege escalation chains emerge? In this way, weaknesses can be identified and addressed early.

From Visibility to Control

Visibility is the necessary foundation for stronger protection—but it is not enough on its own. The next step is to actively reduce risk. Modern IVIP-oriented approaches already offer solutions for that as well.

1. Protection for Previously “Invisible” Authentications

Authentication happens routinely across many IT environments. The problem is that it is often neither monitored nor adequately secured. This is especially true for legacy protocols, older applications, or service accounts that operate in the background between systems. As a result, traditional security controls often do not apply to them at all. IVIP can close this gap by creating transparency everywhere. That makes it possible to secure legacy protocols and protect service accounts without modifying the underlying systems.

2. Enforcing MFA—Even for Technical Identities

Many decision-makers still primarily associate MFA with human logins. But these models cannot simply be transferred to technical identities, because service accounts, machine access, or internal system-to-system communication do not rely on traditional login prompts. IVIP-oriented approaches create the basis for bringing these previously hard-to-secure access paths under protective controls. This makes technical identities visible, reviewable, and far better protected.

3. Real-Time Detection of Suspicious Access

A single access event is often not clearly dangerous on its own. It is the surrounding context that makes it suspicious. That is precisely what makes it difficult for organizations to initiate protective measures. By combining contextual data with behavioral patterns, these anomalies can be assessed more accurately. This creates the opportunity not merely to react after the fact, but to intervene immediately. In this way, unusual usage patterns can be identified, risky access can be blocked, and lateral movement can be stopped.

ℹ️ Tool Tip

Our partner Silverfort has taken on the problem of identity silos and developed a solution to address it. Its platform of the same name gives organizations a continuous view of their identities, roles, permissions, and the relationships behind them. This is made possible by its patented Runtime Access Protection (RAP) technology. It can be integrated into existing IAM infrastructures and enables full visibility across all identities—whether human or machine. By combining visibility with control, it eliminates hidden paths that attackers could otherwise exploit.

Transparency and Security for Identities

Ultimately, identity visibility does for digital identities what inventory-taking does for physical assets: it creates greater oversight, transparency, and control. Companies cannot protect what they do not understand. Any organization that still relies only on isolated bits of information should take the step toward a connected, explainable identity system in order to uncover risks and reduce them in a targeted way.

That allows organizations to solve several problems at once. IVIP provides a reliable foundation for making classic security concepts such as PAM, MFA, or Zero Trust truly effective.

Do you want to see and understand every identity? An Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform can help.

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