Companies of every size depend on Identity and Access Management (IAM), Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), and Privileged Access Management (PAM) to secure logins, enforce policies, and meet compliance requirements. These platforms are the backbone of modern identity security.
But there’s a problem: they can only secure what they connect to.
The apps that don’t integrate are known as disconnected apps—and they’ve become the fastest-growing blind spot in enterprise identity security. Some fail at the login layer (authentication) because they don’t support standards like SAML or OIDC. Others fail at the lifecycle management and permissions layer (authorization) because they don’t connect to identity governance tools. Either way, they leave IT teams stuck with manual work—and attackers with easy entry points.
Disconnected apps aren’t new, but their scale and the risks they create are reaching a breaking point. Here are five reasons your business can no longer afford to ignore them.
The App Sprawl Is Real—and It’s Growing
The average organization now uses over 100 SaaS applications (BetterCloud, 2025). And that’s just the SaaS side of the picture. When you include on-prem, legacy, and proprietary applications, the total number of apps in play climbs 4–5x higher (Salesforce Connectivity Report, 2025).
And the trend isn’t slowing down. Business units are adopting new tools faster than IT can keep track—classic Shadow IT. Marketing, HR, and finance keep building their own stacks, creating a structural mismatch: decentralized adoption vs. centralized security.
Even within SaaS, there’s a persistent misconception: that every application integrates cleanly into IAM and IGA systems. In practice, many don’t. Some lack support for SAML, OIDC, or SCIM. Others technically support federation or provisioning, but only behind a costly paywall—the dreaded SSO tax.
Meanwhile, on-prem and proprietary systems were never designed for identity integration, but the business still depends on them—and keeps adding more. Invisible to IAM tools, these apps are still deeply embedded in business workflows and often store sensitive enterprise data.
App sprawl drives identity sprawl. The more apps you add, the more disconnected corporate identities pile up—fueling unmanaged access, security vulnerabilities, and compliance risks your identity stack can’t resolve.
Manual Provisioning = Security Gaps
Disconnected apps often leave organizations falling back on manual provisioning and deprovisioning—either by routing requests through IT ticketing systems or by letting users create and share accounts outside official controls. Contractors, agencies, and temporary staff often get access informally, with little visibility and even less governance.
The fallout is predictable. A 2024 Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) survey found that 52% of organizations experienced a security incident tied to SaaS access mismanagement. In most cases, the problem was painfully simple: user access that was never revoked, or credentials left unchanged long after an employee walked out the door.
The costs add up quickly. The Ponemon Institute (2025) estimates that insider-related incidents—including cases where ex-employees retained unauthorized access—drain organizations of $17.4 million annually.
Manual provisioning isn’t just inefficient—it’s fragile. It breaks least-privilege models, undermines identity governance, and leaves doors ajar for attackers to walk through.
Shared Credentials Are a Ticking Time Bomb
Disconnected apps are where shared credentials thrive. Business functions like marketing, engineering, and customer service often depend on tools without role-based access controls. The workaround is predictable: credentials stored in spreadsheets, passed around in Slack, or shared with contractors over email.
According to the Ponemon Institute (2023), 41% of IT leaders admit that shared credentials are still in use for at least one critical system. It’s a practice that undermines every principle of identity security. Shared accounts erase visibility into who accessed what, block accountability in audits, and make it impossible to trace malicious activity back to an individual.
Shared credentials don’t just create operational mess—they erode security, accountability, and trust.
Disconnected ≠ Invisible to Attackers
Just because an app is invisible to your identity security system doesn’t mean it’s invisible to attackers. In fact, disconnected apps often become the weakest links in the identity chain.
The blind spots are everywhere. Hardcoded credentials buried in scripts. Service accounts with broad privileges that no one monitors. Passwords for business-critical apps reused across accounts and never rotated. Orphaned accounts that live on long after an employee leaves.
Attackers know this pattern. They don’t waste energy battering your strongest security defenses. They look for forgotten accounts, unmanaged passwords, and poorly governed apps—and slip in through the cracks.
Disconnected apps expand the security attack surface, giving adversaries precisely the kind of opportunities they’re trained to exploit.
You Can’t Enforce Zero Trust on What You Can’t See
Zero Trust has become the north star for enterprise security programs. But disconnected apps sit entirely outside the model.
They don’t enforce MFA. They don’t feed unified audit logs. They don’t honor conditional access policies. And yet, they often contain sensitive customer, employee, and financial data.
Without visibility, Zero Trust is just theory. A Zero Trust strategy that ignores disconnected apps is a half-built bridge—leaving attackers a way across.
Final Thoughts
Disconnected apps aren’t a niche issue—they’re deeply woven into the daily operations of every enterprise—and their footprint is only expanding. Left unmanaged, they create compounding risks for security, compliance, and operations.
The good news? You don’t need to rip and replace your identity security stack. The key is to extend its reach—bringing disconnected apps into your identity perimeter through automation and seamless integration. It’s the only way to close the last-mile gap in enterprise identity security.
Because in identity security, the first rule is simple: you can’t protect what you can’t see.
