As revealed in Cerby’s 2025 Identity Automation Gap Report, 46% of security and IT leaders say their organization has already experienced a security, compliance, or operational issue directly caused by manual identity workflow execution.
Why do manual identity workflows continue to exist, when the consequences of getting them wrong are so serious and when automation tooling is increasingly common?
Looking a bit deeper, how do manual identity workflows create or contribute to security, compliance, or operational issues?
And finally, how can your organization take steps to more fully automate its identity processes?
Let’s find out.
Today’s enterprise application environments are increasingly heterogeneous and complex, typically including a mix of SaaS, mobile, cloud-native, and legacy on-premises systems.
While highly effective for standards-compliant apps, Identity and Access Management (IAM) platforms were never built to integrate with the long tail of disconnected applications—those that don’t support common protocols such as SAML, SCIM, or OAuth.
As a result, IT teams are unable to extend automated security workflows, lifecycle management (LCM), Single Sign On (SSO), and other crucial processes to cover the full collection of apps that exist within the organization’s sprawling environment.
In theory, custom integrations can close these gaps. In practice, this approach simply doesn’t scale.
Instead, most organizations gradually introduce cumbersome workarounds involving spreadsheets (for tracking access), ticketing systems (to initiate access changes and fixes), and manual processes (e.g., to update credentials, enroll in Multi Factor Authentication (MFA), etc.).
Over time, these manual processes steadily and stealthily multiply. Just as the frog in the famous metaphor doesn’t realize it’s being boiled, the organization doesn’t realize how much of its security, compliance, and day-to-day operations are dependent on—and put at risk by—manual identity workflows.
Manual identity workflows impose serious costs across the business—draining IT and security time, increasing exposure to cyber threats, introducing compliance risk, and slowing down everyday productivity.
One of the most immediate and measurable costs of manual identity workflows is the sheer amount of time they consume across IT and security teams.
For example, according to Cerby’s 2025 Identity Automation Gap Report, 59% of organizations still handle provisioning and offboarding manually—using ticketing systems, ad hoc requests, or email-based processes.
That has real cost. A 2023 Ponemon Institute survey of nearly 600 U.S. IT & security practitioners found that it takes, on average, 7 hours to provision access and 8 hours to deprovision access for a single employee. That’s 15 hours per user just to cover the basic bookends of the identity lifecycle.
But the cost doesn’t stop there. Manual identity work doesn’t just show up at onboarding and offboarding—it persists throughout the employee lifecycle. That includes:
These aren’t one-off tasks. They’re persistent, resource-intensive drains on teams that already face growing demands. And every hour spent on manual workflows is time that could be used to strengthen posture, improve response times, or drive strategic initiatives forward.
Manual identity workflows aren’t just inefficient — they’re risky. Every manual step is an opportunity for delay, inconsistency, or human error. And in cybersecurity, those gaps can quickly become entry points for attackers. Delays in deprovisioning, inconsistent enforcement of MFA, overprivileged access, and orphaned accounts all become easier to exploit when identity workflows depend on human execution.
These processes directly weaken your security posture. And the data backs it up.
To put the increased risk in perspective, The Hidden Cybersecurity Threat in Organizations: Disconnected Applications revealed that 52% of survey respondents experienced a cybersecurity incident caused by the inability to secure disconnected applications. The downstream consequences include customer loss, downtime, regulatory fines, and reputational damage. On average, respondents reported a cost of $292,500 per incident to investigate and remediate.
And it’s not just about disconnected apps — it’s about how manual processes amplify human error across the board. The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) delivers a clear warning: nearly 60% of breaches involve a human element, whether through error, manipulation, or malicious misuse.
The reality is this: when identity processes are slow, error-prone, and inconsistent, they can’t keep up with modern threats. And as identity continues to be the #1 attack vector, organizations relying on manual workflows are increasingly exposed — and often don’t realize it until it’s too late.
Manual identity security workflows don’t just raise security concerns — they also introduce compliance gaps. In the 2023 Ponemon Institute study, 47% of organizations said they failed to meet regulatory requirements because of disconnected applications that weren’t properly secured and governed.
These failures come at a cost: 43% reported losing customers, 33% lost business partners, and nearly 20% faced regulatory fines. Even when companies stay compliant, the cost of completing user access reviews in preparation for audits increases significantly without automation, as IT teams must manually pull and consolidate identity data from disparate systems and applications.
Manual processes also slow down the people who rely on timely access to do their jobs. If a user forgets their password for an app outside the SSO system, they submit a helpdesk ticket — and then wait. If they need access to a tool that wasn’t provisioned at onboarding, work stops until access is granted.
These delays might last hours or days. And if the task is part of a broader workflow, everything downstream stalls too. In fast-paced, cross-functional environments, even small access issues can trigger wider workforce slowdowns across teams.
These aren't rare events — they happen every day. And while the exact cost is hard to quantify, the friction is felt across the organization: “Why is this taking so long?”
Identity and access management is so fundamental to today’s organizations that the global market for IAM solutions is expected to reach $43.1 billion by 2029. A huge contributor to the expected value of IAM solutions is their ability to automate important, everyday identity processes. Doing so:
Ultimately, automating identity processes enables organizations to:
It’s no surprise, then, that The 2025 Identity Automation Gap Report showed that 49% of respondents said the single most important step they would take to reduce identity risk is extending automation across more applications and workflows.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative to building and maintaining custom integrations in an effort to connect your IAM and IGA infrastructure to your full app ecosystem.
The Cerby Application Network is a collection of pre-built and fully validated Cerby integrations for thousands of apps, extending the reach of your identity controls to enable:
By extending your identity stack to every application—no matter how it’s built or where it lives—you consolidate centralized control, unlock consistent enforcement, make quick work of audits and compliance reviews, and ensure your team members have convenient and secure access to the applications they need.
And all while eliminating manual workarounds.
Manual identity workflows aren’t just inefficient—they’re incredibly costly, risky, and unsustainable as organizations scale.
And every day that you wait to address this issue just means more cost, more risk, and the creation of even more manual workflows as the frog slowly boils.
Tomorrow can be different, if you contact Cerby today.