Shrinking the IAM Attack Surface: How Unify, Observe, Act Transforms Identity Security
How many dormant accounts are quietly eroding your cyber defenses? What’s your true mean time to remediate (MTTR) a privilege creep?
Organizations juggle sprawling cloud apps and siloed directories. Risk-averse CISOs track these outcome-driven indicators: cut orphaned identities, slash MFA exceptions, and speed up risk fixes. They form and reveal your attack surface’s true size where misconfigurations, dormant accounts, and inconsistent access policies quietly expand risk.
According to Gartner® report, Reduce Your IAM Attack Surface Using Visibility, Observability, and Remediation (Rebecca Archambault, 2025), IAM leaders can strengthen security across centralized and decentralized environments by focusing on three key pillars: visibility, observability, and remediation. Today’s IAM ecosystems are often fragmented across numerous directories, identity providers, and access systems. Business units may configure tools independently, resulting in inconsistent policies and poor oversight.
Common symptoms include:
- Disabled multifactor authentication (MFA)
- Orphaned or dormant accounts
- Exposed machine credentials
- Over-privileged service accounts
These gaps are rarely visible in real time, leaving organizations vulnerable to misuse and lateral movement. As Gartner notes, the market for IAM posture, hygiene, and identity threat detection tools is crowded, yet many offerings address only part of the problem — making it difficult for security leaders to measure progress or understand the full scope of their attack surface. The Solution: A Continuous Loop of Unify → Observe → Act
At Radiant Logic, we believe reducing IAM risk starts with a closed-loop process: Unify → Observe → Act. This model provides the visibility and feedback necessary to continuously measure and improve your identity security posture.
1. Unify: Break Down Silos and Establish a Trusted Identity Fabric
The first step is to unify human, non-human and agentic AI identity data across all sources — on-premises directories, cloud platforms, HR systems, and custom applications — into a single, consistent view. RadiantOne’s Identity Data Management layer ingests, correlates, and normalizes identity attributes to create a complete, authoritative profile for every user, device, and service.
This unified data foundation eliminates blind spots and provides accurate, consistent information that downstream tools need to enforce policy and evaluate risk. Without unification, observability is fragmented — and remediation becomes guesswork.
2. Observe: Gain Real-Time Insight into Identity Hygiene, Posture, and Risk
Once data is unified, organizations can observe how identities interact across systems and where exposures lie. Dashboards and analytics help teams visualize dormant accounts, privilege creep, and inactive entitlements. Outcome-driven metrics (ODMs) replace simple control counts with measurable results — such as the percentage of risky permissions removed or the reduction in mean time to remediate.
Radiant Logic’s observability capabilities make it possible to quantify security progress and track attack-surface reduction over time. These insights allow IAM and security teams to shift from reactive audits to proactive defense, aligning security metrics with business outcomes.
3. Act: Remediate Identity Risks and Automate with Confidence
Visibility is only valuable if it leads to action. The final step in the loop is to act — automating remediation workflows and runtime responses that address risks as soon as they are discovered.
Using RadiantOne’s integration and orchestration capabilities, organizations can trigger alerts, open tickets, or execute corrective actions automatically. For example, if a risky entitlement is detected or a service account behaves abnormally, RadiantOne can inform the appropriate system to disable access or enforce MFA. Integration with runtime protocols such as the Continuous Access Evaluation Profile (CAEP) also enables dynamic policy enforcement — terminating or quarantining suspect sessions until investigation is complete.
Measuring What Matters
We believe Gartner emphasizes the importance of outcome-driven metrics to evaluate IAM effectiveness. Rather than focusing on the number of controls deployed, organizations should measure tangible improvements such as:
- Fewer orphaned or dormant accounts
- Reduced over-privileged access
- Shorter remediation times for risky identities
- Lower rates of MFA exceptions
- Documented decreases in IAM-related audit findings
By tracking these outcomes over time, IAM teams can quantify their progress in shrinking the attack surface and demonstrate real value to business leadership. Radiant Logic enables these measurements through centralized visibility and continuous feedback loops.
From Visibility to Value
As Gartner notes, Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms (IVIPs) represent a major innovation in the IAM market — providing rapid integration, analytics, and a single view of identity data, activity, and posture. We believe Radiant Logic’s inclusion in Hype Cycle™ for Digital Identity, 2025 underscores our position in this emerging category.
By implementing the Unify → Observe → Act loop, organizations can:
- Eliminate identity data silos
- Reveal hidden access risks across environments
- Automate policy enforcement and remediation
- Quantify security improvements with outcome-driven metrics
This continuous cycle transforms identity security from a static process into a dynamic system of improvement — one that strengthens Zero Trust architectures and aligns security outcomes with measurable business value.
Start Closing IAM Security Gaps with Radiant Logic
Reducing your IAM attack surface begins with unified visibility. Radiant Logic helps organizations integrate and understand their identity data, observe it in context, and act with precision. The result is not just stronger security — it’s a measurable path to risk reduction and operational resilience.
Disclosure
Gartner, Reduce Your IAM Attack Surface Using Visibility, Observability, and Remediation, Rebecca Archambault, 8 October 2025
Gartner, Hype Cycle for Digital Identity, 2025, Nayara Sangiorgio, Nathan Harris, 14 July 2025
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, Hype Cycle is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Gartner 2025: Reduce Your IAM Attack Surface with Visibility, Observability, and Remediation
Unified identity data reduces the IAM attack surface with visibility, observability, and automated remediation, supporting Zero Trust and stronger security.
GET THE RESEARCH
