Enterprises are exposing themselves to serious security risks as a result of overly manual identity-related workflows.

On average, it takes enterprises six days to grant a new hire full access to the applications they need to be productive, according to a study by Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia. While this may look like a mere productivity challenge, the findings suggest that slow identity management processes are stripping enterprises of the agility they need to quickly action identity-related infrastructure breaches.

The inefficiencies don’t stop at onboarding. Roughly half of IT and security leaders surveyed said that several tasks related to Identity Governance and Administration impose a problematic level of manual work on their company’s staff.

The most burdensome tasks include provisioning and deprovisioning third-party accounts and credentials, affecting 52% of staff; reviewing and approving user access permission requests, entitlement management tickets, and (re)certifications for applications, file shares, and systems, impacting 51%; and provisioning and deprovisioning employee accounts and credentials, which concerns 49%.

The findings are significant because each day of delay in provisioning or deprovisioning access doesn’t just create potential exposure, but also slows engineering teams from getting work done. In modern, large-scale infrastructure environments, productivity often hinges on engineers having fast, seamless access to the tools and systems they need, without waiting on manual approvals or outdated workflows.

“Productivity is of the utmost priority in security implementations today,” says Ev Kontsevoy, CEO of Teleport, a sponsor of the study.

“Modern infrastructure is too complex, and cyber-attacks too relentless, for engineers to spend a week waiting for access. For dynamic infrastructure environments, identity management processes have become chokepoints for enterprises, slamming the brakes on engineering velocity.

“The only way out of that rut is to replace fragmented, manual identity practices with a unified identity approach that ensures just-in-time, auditable access while eliminating provisioning toil.”

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The scope of user access reviews has also grown, with 80% of respondents reporting an increase in the past year; 82% expect the scope to expand even further over the next two years. The responses highlight the critical need for enterprises to pivot towards just-in-time access strategies.

“There’s clearly a growing tension between security and productivity within enterprises,” says Todd Thiemann, Principal Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia.

“The reality, however, is that you can’t pick one or the other today. A modern, nimble enterprise needs the ability to combine the two. You just can’t run infrastructure at scale when your identity workflows are bogged down by administrative bottlenecks that drain time that could otherwise be spent on innovation.”