Over half of organizations cite technical debt as top hurdle to identity system modernization

Modernizing identity systems is proving difficult for organizations due to two key challenges: decades of accumulated Identity and Access Management (IAM) technical debt and the complexity of managing access across multiple identity providers (IDPs). These findings come from the new Strata Identity-commissioned report, State of Multi-Cloud Identity: Insights and Trends for 2025. The report, based on survey data from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), highlights trends and challenges in securing cloud environments.

The survey, which sought to better understand the industry’s knowledge, attitudes, and opinions regarding multi-cloud identity security trends and challenges, also found that incompatibility with non-standard, legacy applications is a barrier to deploying advanced application authentication for 71% of respondents, further highlighting the issue of technical debt with 54% of respondents citing it as their top hurdle when modernizing their IAM architecture.

In addition, with two-thirds of organizations managing two or more IDPs, 65% of respondents claimed that managing access controls and enforcing consistent security policies across disparate identity systems is a top concern.

“As enterprises accelerate their adoption of multi-cloud, they're encountering significant obstacles in harmonizing hybrid and cloud identity systems for secure integration. High costs related to IAM technical debt, a significant talent gap, vendor lock-in, and the complex task of rewriting legacy applications are impeding progress and slowing innovation,” said Hillary Baron, lead author and Senior Technical Director for Research, Cloud Security Alliance. "It's essential that organizations address these challenges, not only for security and compliance but for operational efficiency and business agility, as well."

Other key findings include:

• The double-edged sword of multi-IDP. While multi-cloud/multi-IDP offers flexibility and enhanced security, it also adds complexity to managing access controls across disparate systems, a concern cited by 65% of respondents. Interestingly, 75% of organizations reported managing two or more IDPs, with 11% relying on five or more.
• Visibility gaps in multi-cloud environments. While 73% of organizations believe improved visibility is essential for enhancing their risk management capabilities, over a third expressed uncertainty in their ability to monitor and control key areas within their IAM environments. Specifically, 40% reported inadequate visibility into user behaviors, 38% said they struggle to maintain visibility into application events, and 36% reported challenges in overseeing how access policies are applied and enforced.
• Strategic investment in identity management for 2025. Despite economic pressures, most organizations are maintaining or increasing their identity management budgets, focusing on areas that closely align with such identified pain points as identity analytics and visibility (53%), legacy system modernization (50%), and IAM availability and resilience (43%).
• Hidden weaknesses in IAM resilience strategies. Many organizations are falling short in building resilient identity infrastructures, leaving them vulnerable to IDP-based outages and disruptions. Only 38% of organizations reported fully implementing measures to ensure continuous availability of identity services, and a troubling 6% admit to having nothing in place. Disconcertingly, 52% of respondents feel only moderately confident—or worse—in their ability to withstand and recover from identity outages or disruptions.
• The high cost of identity service disruptions. Slow recovery times and frequent disruptions aren't just operational issues—they have significant financial and reputational consequences. Whereas, 45% of organizations reported that they need to recover within an hour to avoid unaffordable impacts to the organization, only 28% indicated that they could implement recovery measures within that time frame.

“These findings clearly demonstrate that organizations want and need to migrate from legacy identity systems to modern cloud identity providers but are struggling with the technical debt of having to rewrite applications and manage access across multi-cloud and hybrid identity environments,” said Eric Olden, CEO of Strata Identity. “Identity orchestration offers a path to modernizing identity systems and managing multiple IDPs that eliminates the need to refactor applications and unifies access control while policy enforcement for any number of on-premises and cloud identity systems.”

The survey, which was the first of its kind for CSA, was conducted online by CSA in June/July 2024 and received a total of 950 responses from IT and security professionals from organizations of various sizes and locations. CSA’s research analysts performed the data analysis and interpretation for this report. Sponsors are CSA Corporate Members who support the research project’s findings but have no added influence on the content development or editing rights of CSA research.

Review the complete State of Multi-cloud Identity Survey: Insights and Trends for 2025.