Paying Down IAM Debt: The Blueprint for a Sustainable Future

In every identity program, there’s a quiet cost no one talks about in meetings. It’s not in the budget. It’s not in the roadmap. It’s not even in the Jira backlog. But it shows up everywhere — in access outages, in delayed onboarding, in failed certifications, and in that one engineer who knows how all the custom logic works (and no one else does). That cost is IAM debt — and it’s usually the reason modernizing your access strategy feels like dragging a boulder uphill. By now, you’ve seen how this debt accumulates: shortcuts in architecture, stale roles, rubber-stamp certifications, brittle integrations, and exceptions that never go away. It’s like a little red ballon floating in the distance….

This final post is about what to do next.

Let’s get one thing clear: you don’t “reboot” your IAM program.

You unwind it. You untangle it. You rebuild it in-flight.And that means you need a sustainable strategy that doesn’t require a five-year plan or 20-person task force to get started.It starts with this mindset:

Every project is a chance to reduce debt or create more.

So make it a rule — no new net debt. From this moment forward, everything you build should either maintain or improve the clarity, automation, and integrity of your identity program.

That’s the foundation. Now let’s talk action.

There’s a temptation to “solve IAM debt with tools.”

And yes, better tools matter — but tools don’t clean up data. People do.

Before you plug in that new lifecycle engine or run your access policies through AI, start with standardization:

This isn’t glamorous. It won’t win you a security award.

But it’s the foundation of everything that comes next. Because automation applied to chaos just makes things worse, faster.

And yes AI can help with this, but remember the point of this is to get clean and stay clean. Which brings me to my next point..

You don’t clean IAM once. You clean it forever.

Paying down debt isn’t a project — it’s a habit.Build time into your quarterly sprints for “IAM hygiene.” That includes:

Think of it like flossing for your identity stack.Skip it, and eventually, something hurts.IAM hygiene becomes easier when it’s embedded into your processes. Don’t make cleanup something special. Make it something expected.

Want to stop debt from forming again? Let policy do the heavy lifting.Every time someone asks for an access exception, ask yourself: Could a policy handle this scenario better?

That could mean building business rules into your provisioning engine. Or applying risk-based access controls that flex based on user behavior. Or enforcing access expiration windows for contractors and temporary roles. The more you can express your intent in policy — and enforce it through automation — the less room there is for IAM to drift into chaos.

But Dave, the business won’t let us, because this one time 7 years ago we ran this script that this contractor wrote that removed the access for this executive who no longer works here, and he got really mad and so now we can’t do any automation and we manually do everything.

…………..

Listen, you can’t let failure stop you from automating. The reason why most organizations don’t automate is that they try to do to much, and they only automate half the problem. Meaning if you can automate how to take something away, you have to also automate how to give something back, only then do you put it into production. The business isn’t mad that you automated, the business is mad that you can’t fix it when it breaks.

Moving on.

IAM debt thrives when the rest of the organization sees identity as “someone else’s job.” You can’t fix that with better tech. You fix it by changing the conversation. Start educating stakeholders — HR, app owners, line-of-business leads — about the role they play in keeping IAM clean. Why does bad data from HR cause failures downstream? Why does a lack of application ownership lead to role sprawl? Why do privilege reviews only work when someone actually understands the access?

Your goal isn’t to make everyone an identity expert. It’s to make them identity aware. Start building bridges!

You don’t need a “perfect” identity program. You need one that gets better every month — not more complicated. The real win isn’t deploying a new system or hitting a maturity model benchmark.It’s when your identity stack works like muscle memory: When access makes sense. When exceptions are rare. When risk signals are connected.When new apps onboard in days minutes— not months.

That’s what paying down IAM debt looks like: Less friction. More trust. Fewer surprises.

You won’t get there overnight. But you don’t have to. Just start making tomorrow cleaner than today.That’s how you build an identity program that won’t buckle under its own weight.