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In IAM, nothing is truly “temporary.” Every quick fix, every shortcut, every “we’ll clean it up later” decision turns into a tab you’ll eventually have to pay. And the interest rate is brutal.
The Hidden Ledger in Every IAM Program
When people talk about “technical debt,” they usually mean outdated code, legacy systems, or integration nightmares. But IAM has its own form of debt — and it’s sneakier. It hides in workflows, in role models, in the way your data is structured, and in the access exceptions you let slide “just this once.”
It starts small. An urgent request comes in from the business:
“We just hired a new regional manager, but our system doesn’t recognize their title yet. Can you manually provision access?”
You do it because it’s fast, and you have other fires to fight.
Or maybe your authoritative source has inconsistent department data, so you build a quick mapping table to “clean it up” at ingestion. You tell yourself it’s temporary until HR standardizes their data. That was four years ago. Now the mapping logic lives in three different places, and no one remembers how it works.
Each of these moments feels small. But together, they form a hidden ledger of workarounds and one-off solutions — the IAM debt that will slow you down, increase your risk, and make every future change harder.
The Compound Interest of Bad Decisions
IAM debt doesn’t just sit there quietly; it compounds.
The first layer of debt is complexity. Every custom connector, every conditional mapping, every special-case entitlement adds to the complexity of your environment. That complexity slows down onboarding for new applications, increases the number of failed provisioning jobs, and creates brittle dependencies that break when you least expect it.
The second layer is maintenance overhead. Shortcuts rarely get revisited, so they become “permanent fixtures” of your IAM architecture. When something breaks, no one remembers why it was built that way — or if it’s even still needed. Fixing it takes longer because you’re also trying to reverse-engineer the decision-making behind it.
And the third layer is risk. IAM debt often translates to stale access, inconsistent enforcement of policies, or outright exceptions to security controls. Those shortcuts you took in 2019 might be the reason an external auditor finds 47 active accounts with high-level entitlements that no one has touched in two years.
Starting to sound familar?
How Debt Slows Transformation
Here’s where it really bites: IAM debt isn’t just a security problem; it’s a blocker to modernization.
Want to move from on-prem to cloud IGA? Every undocumented customization becomes a migration project in itself. Want to roll out least-privilege role design? You first have to unwind years of entitlement creep baked into old role models. Want to automate provisioning end-to-end? You’ll hit a wall when you realize half your apps require manual workarounds because of mismatched data or broken connectors.
Debt slows down every initiative. The more you have, the more energy you spend maintaining the past instead of building the future.
The irony is that most IAM debt starts with good intentions: speed, flexibility, and responsiveness to the business. But without a plan to revisit those decisions, you’ve just traded a short-term win for a long-term burden.
Story Time with Dave
I once worked on a project where I was called in to troubleshoot a problem that was happening when new users were onboarding. I don’t remember the exact details, but something was happening with the attributes of the users that would cause them to end up in this kind of “orphaned” state. So I created a workflow to fix the user’s attributes and put them in the correct state. I specifically told the customer that this was meant as a short-term fix, and that the real problem needed to be handled in the logic of the onboarding workflow, or fix the attributes themselves. Fast forward a couple of months, I’m back to the project and guess what’s still there. Yup. The workflow I created, but more importantly, it had become part of the standard procedures for handling that situation. 🤦🏿♂️
That’s the reality of “temporary” in IAM. If you don’t have a process to retire it, it’s permanent.
The trickiest part is that IAM debt often isn’t visible in the way infrastructure debt is. You can see a legacy server. You can see outdated code. But IAM debt is buried in:
Role models that haven’t been updated in years but still drive entitlements.
Workflow logic with dozens of conditional branches that only one person understands.
Custom scripts that patch over data quality problems instead of fixing them at the source.
Access exceptions that were granted for a “special case” and never revoked.
Because it’s invisible, it doesn’t get tracked, budgeted for, or prioritized. Which means it keeps growing quietly in the background.
Breaking the Cycle
The first step to breaking free from IAM debt is acknowledging it exists. That means building a culture where quick fixes are documented, tracked, and — most importantly — reviewed regularly. It means designing with the assumption that “temporary” will stick around far longer than intended.
It also means pushing back when the business asks for solutions that create more debt. That’s hard in the moment, especially if it slows things down. But every “just this once” is a future roadblock. Sometimes the best way to serve the business quickly is to slow them down today so you can move faster tomorrow.
And yes, it means tackling the existing backlog. That’s not a one-time cleanup; it’s a continuous process of refactoring roles, removing dead logic, standardizing data, and closing exceptions.
Final Thought: The Interest Rate Is Non-Negotiable
IAM debt isn’t something you can choose to pay later without consequence. The interest rate is set by the laws of complexity and risk: the longer you wait, the more it costs to fix.If you keep adding to the ledger without paying it down, you’ll eventually reach a point where change feels impossible. Every new project will be met with, “We can’t do that because of how our IAM is set up.” That’s when you’ve stopped leading your identity program and started being led by it.
The good news is that debt is reversible. But the best time to start paying it down is before you need the breathing room. Because in IAM, debt doesn’t forgive. It doesn’t forget. And it will collect — with interest.