How to rationalize IDPs (without painful migrations) – Source: securityboulevard.com

Why identity fragmentation becomes a real problem

At first, having multiple identity providers might seem like a necessary side effect of growth, especially after a few acquisitions or cloud migrations. However, over time, this fragmented identity architecture starts to cause severe headaches.

For starters, it’s expensive. Running multiple IdPs means paying for overlapping licenses, support, and ongoing maintenance. That money goes to complexity, not innovation.

It also slows things down. Each IdP tends to live in its little world, managed by different teams with their own policies and processes. That makes it harder to coordinate access and troubleshoot, and it is nearly impossible to enforce consistent controls across your environments.

Multi-cloud only amplifies the issue. If you have separate IdPs for AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem systems, you’re juggling IAM policies in multiple places. That increases the risk of misconfigurations and missed alerts and makes it harder to respond quickly when something goes wrong.

Then there’s the user experience. Frustration builds quickly when users need to log in multiple times across different apps or platforms. It’s inefficient and opens the door to risky workarounds like password reuse or unsanctioned tools.

From a security perspective, every additional IdP is another potential attack surface. It makes monitoring access, detecting anomalies, and preventing credential sprawl harder. Identity lifecycle tasks — onboarding, offboarding, or enforcing role-based access — become manual, error-prone, and inconsistent.

In short, identity sprawl isn’t just an IT problem. It’s a cost problem, a security problem, and a user experience problem. And the longer it goes unchecked, the more it holds your business back.