Why identity has become the new security perimeter and why IAM now matters more than ever.
Over the past few years, one shift in cybersecurity has become impossible to ignore: identity has quietly taken over as the core control plane of enterprise security. It’s not a trend. It’s not the industry chasing the next buzzword. It’s the inevitable outcome of how our digital environments have evolved, and how attackers have evolved with them.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is no longer the quiet plumbing in the background. It’s now the thing holding the entire house together. And the appetite for better IAM tools is rising fast because the way we work, build, and defend systems has fundamentally changed.
In this blog, I want to unpack why IAM has become so central. Not in abstract “Zero Trust” terms, and not through the lens of vendor hype, but in the context of real IT leadership challenges: cloud adoption, escalating threats, AI-powered scams, messy hybrid estates, SaaS sprawl, and the sheer complexity of running modern digital services.
The expanding world we operate in
Let’s start with a simple observation: our digital environments now look nothing like they did a decade ago:
We run workloads across multiple platforms/ clouds.
Employees work from anywhere on devices we may or may not manage.
Our environments talk to hundreds of SaaS services, often each with its own identity model.
Machines, bots, APIs, workloads, pipelines and IoT devices now outnumber human users.
This landscape has made one thing crystal clear: the old network perimeter is thoroughly gone.
When an application is exposed over the Internet, when a developer triggers an automated workflow from home, or when a SaaS platform connects directly to your core systems via API, the idea of “inside” vs “outside” collapses. You can’t firewall your way out of that.
So, what determines whether a user, device, or workload should get access?
Identity.
Identity is now the front door, the back door, the windows, and the side gate. It’s the thing attackers go after because it’s the thing that unlocks everything.
IAM is about more than logins - it’s about limiting the blast radius
Gartner defines IAM as enabling the “right individuals to access the right resources at the right time for the right reasons.” Simple in theory, but deceptively hard in practice.
Modern IAM spans:
Identity establishment
Identity verification
Credential binding (creating a secure authentication credential)
Access assurance
Authentication
Authorization
Adaptive access
SSO
JIT/JEA privilege
Operational identity
Machine & workload identities
API & service identities
Secrets & key management
Governance & oversight
Lifecycle management (JML)
Entitlement governance
Access reviews & certification
Identity analytics & context
In other words: IAM is now both your front-door security guard and your internal access auditor. The better you are at it, the smaller the impact when something inevitably goes wrong.
Identity became the perimeter because attackers made it so
The shift to identity-first security wasn’t driven by vendors, it was driven by threat actors/ criminals.
Microsoft’s 2024 Digital Defense Report shows it is now handling over 600 million cyber and identity-related attacks every day across its ecosystem, while the Verizon 2024 DBIR still finds stolen credentials as the single most common initial action in breaches (around 24% of cases).
(Sources: Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024, Verizon DBIR 2024)
Attackers no longer waste time trying to exploit obscure vulnerabilities. Why break in when you can simply log in?
And AI has taken this further:
Phishing that references real personal data
Deepfake voice fraud
Convincing fake IT helpdesk calls
Tailored social engineering at scale
This is no longer phishing, it’s industrialised impersonation. That reality alone is enough to justify beefing up identity security, but it’s not the only reason.
Cloud adoption has made IAM unavoidable
Cloud platforms centralise almost everything behind API calls, tokens, entitlements, and role definitions. Administrative functions, data access, infrastructure deployment: all of it is now controlled through identity and permission sets.
In a cloud-first world, IAM isn’t a bolt-on. It’s the primary way you defend:
privileged accounts
cloud control planes
SaaS integrations
DevOps pipelines
serverless and container workloads
multi-cloud entitlements
And here’s the part that catches most organisations off-guard: machine identities now vastly outnumber human users (service principals, tokens, managed identities, CI/CD accounts).
Many organisations have thousands of these quietly powering their automation. Each one is effectively a key: if it’s over-privileged, misconfigured, or unmonitored, attackers love it.
This is where “Shadow Access” becomes a real risk ie. access paths created unintentionally through service accounts, automation scripts, connected apps, or legacy permissions nobody remembers granting.
You can’t manage that manually. You can barely even see it without proper IAM tooling.
Zero Trust isn’t a buzzword, it’s an operating model built on IAM
If the perimeter is gone and identity is the new attack surface, Zero Trust stops being a philosophy and becomes a necessity.
Three core Zero Trust principles are built around IAM:
Verify explicitly
Don’t trust a user because of their location, device, or network. Authenticate and authorise continuously based on real-time context.
Least privilege
Shrink entitlements, reduce standing privileges, use JIT and JEA to limit exposure.
Assume breach
Design systems so that a compromised identity can’t freely roam your environment.
IAM is how Zero Trust becomes real.
The digital footprint problem
Even organisations with mature IAM a few years ago are now grappling with:
Multi-cloud
Cloud apps and SaaS
IoT
Operational Technology (OT)
Remote and hybrid work
Third-party integrations
API-driven automation
DevOps tooling
Each adds identities, entitlements, and attack paths.
This isn’t a policy problem; It’s a problem of visibility, governance, and real-time enforcement - exactly what modern IAM is designed to tackle.
Why IAM demand is accelerating
The growth in demand makes sense when you connect the dots:
Identity attacks rising exponentially
AI making impersonation cheap and scalable
Cloud shifting everything behind identity
Machine identities exploding
Regulators expecting identity-first controls
Boards demanding auditability and resilience
The cloud IAM market is expected to grow over 17% every year this decade (Fortune Business Insights, Cloud IAM Market Report 2024). Not because organisations want shiny new tools, but because IAM has become foundational to how organisations defend themselves.
A better analogy
Security used to be a castle with one main gate. Now it’s a city with thousands of entrances, and every one of them needs its own identity check.
IAM is how you secure them without slowing your organisation down.
Final thought
If you’re an IT leader trying to make sense of the world right now, one thing is clear: identity has become the thread that runs through everything - user access, cloud operations, cyber resilience, compliance, Zero Trust, and automation.
IAM isn’t just another security programme. It’s the architecture we now build on. And the organisations that get this right aren’t just reducing risk - they’re creating a foundation that makes cloud adoption smoother, transformation faster, and security more predictable in a world that’s anything but.
IAM isn’t another security initiative.
It’s the architecture everything else depends on.
And the organisations that get it right don’t just reduce risk - they move faster, modernise more easily, and build resilience in a world that’s only getting more complex.
Contact us to discuss how Shaping Cloud can support your IAM requirements and goals.