In most modern enterprises, no one can confidently answer the question: “Who has access to what, and why?” That’s not because of negligence—it’s because the systems we use to manage access were built for a different era. As cloud-native environments, dynamic engineering workflows, and AI agents reshape the enterprise, authorization is drifting silently out of alignment. This is identity drift—and it’s turning authorization into the weakest link in modern security.

How We Got Here

Enterprise authorization has merely accumulated. What began as a way to streamline IT provisioning became, by necessity, the security perimeter. Early IAM systems (e.g. LDAP, Active Directory, IdPs) were built primarily to authenticate users and assign coarse-grained permissions based on their organizational role. The dominant pattern was group membership: define access by team, business unit, or job title, and apply it at login time. This was manageable when application environments were monolithic, user populations were stable, and security was perimeter-based. Modern enterprises require much more.

Modern Realities Break the Authentication Model

Authentication is a first line of defense—verifying that an identity is who it claims to be and letting someone in. 

But in modern environments, those assumptions have broken down:

• Users shift roles frequently, often without corresponding updates to access 

• Engineering organizations grant access dynamically, not just at the time of onboarding

• Cloud-native infrastructure introduces thousands of ephemeral resources

• Non-human identities (NHIs)—ranging from service accounts and CI/CD pipelines to AI agents—now comprise most identity activity in many environments

Despite these changes, most organizations still rely on static, role-based entitlements that are provisioned once and revoked only during periodic access reviews or incident response. Most reviews are perfunctory—a checkbox activity that rarely changes who can access what. The effect is a slow but steady expansion of privilege that few teams can fully map, let alone control.

Fragmentation of Control 

The issue is compounded by the distributed nature of authorization logic itself:

• Infrastructure teams manage IAM roles, Terraform modules, and access to cloud resources

• SaaS admins control access in application-specific consoles

• IT teams provision access through IdPs and ticket queues

• Security teams are responsible for outcomes but often lack direct control

This fragmentation makes it difficult to answer a few basic questions: 

Who can access this resource? 

Why do they have that access?

When was it last used?

What would break if we removed it?

As a result, authorization remains reactive, not preventive, only surfacing during audits, escalation deadlocks, or breach triage. 

Authentication ≠ Authorization

The legacy access approach is failing because the underlying model—authorization as a one-time decision based on static group membership—was never built to operate in a fast-changing, multi-cloud, engineer-driven, AI-augmented enterprise.

Authentication gets you through the door, but authorization governs the interior—where the real damage happens. But authorization logic lives in too many places, governed by too many disconnected owners. Even the most well-resourced teams lack a unified view of who has access to what, why, and for how long.

Authorization has become the true perimeter and yet, it remains one of the least mature components of enterprise security. It is rarely designed to prevent abuse, contain blast radius, or enable real-time decisioning. 

How Breaches Exploit Traditional Access Models

Breaches don’t end at the point of entry. They escalate when weak or overly permissive authorization allows attackers to move laterally, escalate privileges, or access sensitive systems unchecked.

In most identity-based attacks, the attacker’s path is defined almost entirely by the state of authorization controls: dormant entitlements, excessive standing access, misconfigured policies, and fragmented app-level logic. 

Think real-world breaches like: 

• MOVEit: overly trusted backend processes allowed for broad data access

• Okta: excessive standing privileges in support tools

• SharePoint: nested groups masking high-risk access paths 

• Snowflake: persistent access sessions with no runtime controls

• 23andMe: impact driven not by login flaws, but by overbroad authorization defaults

These aren’t edge cases—they are the norm. And in all of these cases, the entry point was not novel. The breach escalated because of insufficient or misaligned authorization controls—either too coarse-grained, too permissive, or too deeply embedded to be audited and enforced centrally.

Let’s Focus on the True Perimeter

Identity drift isn’t a glitch—it’s structural. The slow but steady misalignment between access and actual need is becoming the quiet breach vector no one’s watching closely enough.

Despite how breaches unfold, most organizations still rely on static access policies configured during provisioning and rarely re-evaluated. Real-time enforcement, context-aware controls, and automated privilege reduction remain rare.

Authorization is the most direct lever security teams have to reduce blast radius. Yet it remains a loosely governed, poorly instrumented, and often invisible layer of the stack. This sets the stage for deeper operational and security risk.

Want to learn about the hidden costs of legacy models and how organizations are reducing risks and gaining control? Download our ebook, “Identity Drift: How Authorization Became the Quiet Breach Vector”.