Identity Fabric: Stitching Together IAM or Selling the Emperor’s New Clothes?

We started hearing the term “identity fabric” in late 2022 and it has surged from roughly 15 mentions that year to over 400 so far in 2025 as enterprises embrace composable, zero-trust identity frameworks. If you are like me, you tend to suspect terms with that kind of growth.  Inevitably there’s a lot of hype mixed in with real and valuable developments in our field.  But identity fabric is a real and valuable goal.

Identity fabric is a strategic architecture that unifies fragmented identity and access management (IAM) systems into a cohesive, centrally governed framework. Rather than bolting on discrete tools, it weaves together authentication, authorization, telemetry, and policy enforcement into a single control plane. At its heart sits an orchestrator that communicates with SSO, MFA, identity governance, privileged access, CIAM, and legacy proxies—ensuring every access decision, from cloud workloads to OT endpoints, follows the same rules and context.

Under the hood, an identity fabric comprises:

• A policy engine that codifies access rules and risk thresholds.
• Connectors and APIs that bridge modern IAM services with on-prem directories, SCADA systems, and third-party platforms.
• A context aggregation layer that collects device posture, user behavior, risk signals, and external threat intelligence in real time.
• An automation/workflow layer that provisions, deprovisions, and adjusts entitlements across all identity domains without manual intervention.

The result is consistent security, operational efficiency, and comprehensive visibility. Organizations eliminate credential sprawl, enforce adaptive policies everywhere, and dramatically shrink time-to-detect for identity-based threats. But building an effective fabric means tackling challenges like legacy integration, data normalization, and governance model alignment—issues too often left to slide when teams rely on patchwork IAM.

A real-world cautionary tale is the Okta support engineer breach in January 2022. Attackers compromised a third-party support account and, over five days, captured screenshots of Okta’s admin consoles and customer environments. With siloed identity governance and no unified telemetry, Okta lacked the means to detect anomalous sessions or enforce dynamic policies—demonstrating exactly why a true identity fabric, with shared context and centralized controls, is non-negotiable.

To gauge whether your environment is running on a fabric rather than duct-taped IAM, ask yourself:

1. Can we centrally orchestrate and enforce access policies across cloud, on-prem, and legacy systems from one control plane?
2. Do our IAM components share real-time context—risk signals, device posture, user behavior—to drive adaptive access decisions?
3. Is user lifecycle management (onboarding, provisioning, deprovisioning) fully automated across all domains, including third parties and OT assets?
4. Can we detect, correlate, and respond to identity-based anomalies across the entire estate in real time?

In this real training for free event we will dive into what separates a patchwork of IAM solutions from a tightly woven fabric.  We will strictly avoid vague, amorphous technobabble; instead, we’ll examine:

• Real security incidents that illustrate the need for an integrated fabric
• Specific scenarios that routinely happen in the real world at organizations where integration in identity fabric is critical to mitigating risk
• How to perform self-assessment for your organization to determine how integrated your IAM estate is

No one can implement fabric in a day.  It is a phased journey: start with a thorough gap analysis of your IAM domains (SSO, MFA, lifecycle, PAM, context aggregation, logging, legacy/OT, third-party), score each gap’s severity, and prioritize the top risks using a business-criticality × threat-likelihood × gap-severity formula. Then map out a multi-phase roadmap—beginning with centralized visibility, add pilot connectors and a policy engine, layer in real-time context signals, automate provisioning/deprovisioning workflows, and finally extend controls to legacy/OT systems and external vendors. At each phase, measure key metrics (time-to-provision, manual escalations, MTTD/MTTR), iterate on connectors and policies, and scale until your IAM estate operates as a cohesive, orchestrated fabric rather than a patchwork of tools.

My sponsor for this real training for free event is One Identity and Robert Kraczek will show you how a feature-rich Identity Fabric provided by One Identity can help satisfy modern Identity Security requirements and work within an organization’s security program.

Please join us for this real training for free session.