The Hidden Risk of Orphan Accounts
Jan 20, 2026
Enterprise Security / AI Security
The Problem: The Identities Left Behind As organizations grow and evolve, employees, contractors, services, and systems come and go - but their accounts often remain. These abandoned or "orphan" accounts sit dormant across applications, platforms, assets, and cloud consoles. The reason they persist isn't negligence - it's fragmentation. Traditional IAM and IGA systems are designed primarily for human users and depend on manual onboarding and integration for each application - connectors, schema mapping, entitlement catalogs, and role modeling. Many applications never make it that far. Meanwhile, non-human identities (NHIs): service accounts, bots, APIs, and agent-AI processes are natively ungoverned, operating outside standard IAM frameworks and often without ownership, visibility, or lifecycle controls. The result? A shadow layer of untracked identities forming part of the broader identity dark matter - accounts invisible to governance but still active in infrastructure. Wh...