IVIP: A New Category Pitches Visibility as the Cure for IAM Sprawl

Identity and access management has fragmented across SaaS, cloud, and on-prem systems faster than most organizations can map. The result is an attack surface defined less by misconfigured permissions than by accounts, service principals, and entitlements no one is tracking — orphaned credentials, shadow admin paths, and stale federations that audit tools miss because they sit between the seams of existing IAM, IGA, and PAM products.

Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platforms (IVIP) are positioned as the connective layer: continuous discovery of every human and non-human identity, normalized across providers, with risk scoring against actual usage and reachability rather than policy-on-paper. The pitch is that you cannot reduce identity attack surface you cannot see, and that traditional IAM stacks were built to provision access, not to inventory and reason about it.

Whether IVIP becomes a durable category or gets absorbed into ITDR and CIEM offerings is the open question. The underlying problem — non-human identities outnumbering human ones by an order of magnitude, with no consistent owner — is real, and the gap between provisioning tools and detection tools is where most modern intrusions now live.