Most identity teams have done the responsible work. You set up an IdP for SSO, enforced MFA, rolled out IGA, and protected admin paths with PAM. Yet privilege-creep lingers, offboarding is inconsistent in the details, and blind spots show up across SaaS, cloud, on-premise, and internal systems. That outcome is not a bad strategy or a failure to follow best practices. It is the natural result of growth and complexity. People move roles, apps multiply, automation creates new access edges, and non-human identities are on the rise. Meeting that reality calls for a new way to understand and act on identity.

That is the point of an Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform (IVIP). An IVIP is a single place that unifies identity data, models how permissions actually relate to resources, and presents decisions you can carry out in the flow of work. It does not discard what you already have. It helps you run it better. In some organizations it also starts to absorb work that once lived in a legacy IGA suite. The goal is simple - make identity management easier and safer for admins, security teams, and end users.

The challenge with today’s stack

Identity programs grew up in a world of clearly bounded systems. Today the edges are fuzzier. A single user can participate in or hold a mix of IdP groups, application roles, inherited permissions, and temporary tokens. A single workload can carry keys and service principals that unlock powerful APIs. None of these are bad on their own. The problem is that the important questions are relational. Who can do what on which resource. What breaks if we remove this group? Which rights are unused and could be reduced?

Tabular inventories struggle with relational questions. They are good at counting, not at explaining. When decisions depend on how objects connect, you need a model that treats connections as first class citizens. That’s the gap I see IVIP stepping into.

Model relationships, not rows

Identity is a network of relationships. Human to account. Account to group. Group to role. Role to permission. Permission to resource. Owner to business unit. A platform that understands these links can answer the questions that matter and can do it in near real time. That is why a graph model is the right foundation. It makes it cheap to ask hard questions and safe to automate the obvious ones.

Here is a scenario that plays out every week: A senior engineer moves into a product role. HR updates the employee record. Some IdP groups change. On the surface, access looks correct. Yet a handful of admin privileges remain through inherited groups and application-local roles. The person no longer needs elevation but still holds write or admin rights in systems that touch production. A graph reveals the full path that keeps those rights alive. An IVIP should tie the HR event to identity edges, highlight the drift, show the exact inheritance that matters, and propose a safe remediation plan. You remove the unneeded entitlements, convert any remaining elevation to just-in-time, and keep the evidence for audit. No spreadsheets. No guesswork. No surprises six months later.

Intelligence that gets work done

Dashboards summarize. Intelligence drives change. Useful identity intelligence has three traits. It is explainable, precise, and actionable.

Explainable means you can see the path that produced the score or the alert. Breadth of access matters, but so do signals like inactivity, weak factors, external ownership, or exposure to sensitive resources. If you can explain and understand the calculation, you can defend the decision.

Precise means the recommendation is specific. Remove entitlement A and group B. Usage has been zero for 90 days. Peers in the new role do not hold either. Residual rights still allow task C. That is a decision a manager or owner can approve quickly.

Actionable means you close the loop in the same place you saw the issue. Revoke or reduce with one action. Time-bound a role and move on. Route a minimal approval to the true owner with context attached. The cost of doing the right thing needs to be low. 

Coverage that matches how people and systems actually work

Coverage is not a list of connectors. It is a promise that the model reflects reality. That means human and non-human identities with clear ownership. SaaS, cloud, and on-prem applications with resource-level permissions, not just role names. Accounts inside and outside SSO, including application-local identities that bypass centralized controls. Peer and behavioral context so least privilege can be achieved with confidence. Segregation of duties checks that cross systems rather than living inside a single suite.

If one of these dimensions is missing, you introduce governance gaps or create an audit headache. An IVIP should bring them together so you can reason across them without stitching exports by hand.

What impact should an IVIP have?

Teams that adopt an IVIP, or a set of features that amount to the IVIP promise, should feel the impact in their first quarter. The first change is clarity. Dormant accounts, unused admin roles, overprivileged accounts, and other risks surface with owners attached and suggested fixes ready to go. The second change is decision quality. Right-sizing stops being personal and becomes a repeatable pattern. The platform shows the path, explains the risk, and proposes the minimal safe change. Approvals get shorter because the context is built in. The third change is operational momentum. Mean time to remediate identity risk becomes a real metric. Access becomes both safer and faster because defaults are designed to unblock work without widening blast radius.

There is also a cultural effect. Security and IT work from a single source of truth. Less time is spent reconciling spreadsheets. More time is spent making clear reductions that everyone understands.

A pragmatic way to start

Start by unifying what you already own. Ingest IdP, HRIS, IGA, PAM, the major SaaS applications, cloud providers, and the internal systems that carry the most risk. Normalize identities and connect both human and non-human principals to owners and resources. Then turn on opinionated detections. Focus on partially offboarded users, inherited admin rights, application-local accounts, orphaned service identities, risky factors, unused entitlements, and cross-system SoD. Require each finding to ship with owner, impact, and a proposed remediation.

From there, move to continuous right-sizing. Use usage data and peer baselines to convert standing privilege into least privilege. Prefer time-bound or approval-bound elevation over permanent admin. Simple policies go a long way. For example, remove any entitlement unused for a set number of days unless the owner opts out with a reason.

Close the loop with one-click actions and lightweight approvals. Record evidence automatically. Measure what matters: privileged account count, accounts outside SSO, time to remove unused admin access, percentage of time-bound elevation, and the number of automated right-sizing actions. These measures tie identity work to risk reduction and business velocity.

Use AI as an accelerator with guardrails. Summarize context, propose candidate roles, and prioritize onboarding. Keep data scoped to the task, respect privacy, and admit uncertainty rather than guessing. AI should help you move faster on correct work, not cover up missing data.

Where this leaves IGA

IGA remains useful for lifecycle governance, certifications, and policy. IVIP complements that mission by providing full-fidelity visibility, trustworthy analytics, and closed-loop execution. In some environments IVIP will take over most decisioning and remediation while IGA handles specific compliance workflows. In others, teams choose to consolidate further. The point is not to keep every tool. The point is to meet today’s complexity with a model and workflow that can keep up.

The bottom line

You do not need to master every application’s permission model. You need a platform that understands them, unifies them, and gives you the fastest safe decision for each situation. That requires a relationship-aware model, explainable analytics, disciplined use of AI, and an operational loop that ends in a real change. Build IVIP on those principles and you will find issues sooner, fix them faster, and keep people moving without widening risk. That is what good identity looks like at modern scale.