Your driver’s license proves you can drive, but it isn’t you. This simple distinction between credentials and identity is creating a massive security blind spot that most organizations don’t even know exists.
An Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform (IVIP) is a comprehensive solution that provides real-time visibility, intelligent analysis, and automated governance of all identities, both human and machine, across an organization’s digital ecosystem. According to Gartner’s 2025 Hype Cycle, IVIP represents the evolution of identity management, addressing 97% of identities that traditional IAM solutions miss.
This distinction between identity and credentials matters more than ever as organizations face an explosion of machine identities, AI agents, and increasingly sophisticated attacks that exploit this fundamental confusion.
Key Statistics at a Glance
- 45:1 – Machine identities to human identities ratio
- 67% – Service accounts that are orphaned (no owner)
- 20,000 – Average identities per 1,000 employees
- 10% – What traditional IAM tools actually see
- 97% – Identities that aren’t human
What’s the Difference Between Identity and Credentials?
Identities are the actual entities (human or machine), while credentials are just the proof of who they are. Think of it this way: you are a person, your driver’s license is a credential. An application is an identity, its API key is a credential.
In the digital world, this distinction is critical. A human identity is the actual person: the employee, contractor, or partner. Their passwords, tokens, and certificates? Those are just credentials. The same applies to machines: the service or application is the identity, while the service account or authentication token it uses are merely credentials.
This confusion isn’t academic. It’s creating real security problems. When organizations focus on managing credentials instead of understanding identities, they miss the actual risk. Who owns that service account? What’s its purpose? When was it last used? Without Identity Intelligence, these questions go unanswered.
Why Can’t Organizations See Their Identity Risks?
Most organizations struggle to differentiate between identities and their associated credentials, resulting in significant security gaps. This isn’t a future problem. It’s happening now.
The Microsoft breach by Storm-0558 started with a single compromised service account. That account had existed for years with no documented owner. It had credentials nobody remembered issuing. This isn’t an outlier. Our research shows 67% of service accounts are orphaned, meaning no one knows who’s responsible for them.
When you can’t see identities clearly, you can’t protect them. Organizations are managing passwords while remaining blind to who or what is using them. They’re rotating credentials on accounts that shouldn’t exist. They’re securing the digital equivalent of driver’s licenses while having no idea who’s actually driving.
And the problem is growing exponentially with machine identities.
The Service Account Explosion
For every human identity in your organization, there are 45 machine identities, and that ratio doubles every year. Service accounts now outnumber human accounts by nearly 50 to 1.
These aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. Each machine identity represents potential access to critical systems:
- Service accounts embedded in applications
- API keys hardcoded in scripts
- Automation accounts running business processes
- Database connections with persistent access
- Container identities spinning up and down
Traditional discovery methods fail because service accounts hide everywhere:
- Scheduled tasks on servers
- Application configuration files
- Database connection strings
- Cloud automation scripts
- Container orchestration platforms
The multiplication effect makes this terrifying. One over-privileged service account can access hundreds of systems. Those systems contain other service accounts. The blast radius expands exponentially. Without comprehensive visibility, you’re not just vulnerable. You’re blind to your actual attack surface.
Traditional IAM tools weren’t built for this reality.
Why Traditional IAM Falls Short
IAM tools were designed for human identities in a simpler world. They can’t handle the scale and complexity of modern machine identities. The architecture itself is the problem.
Here are the critical blind spots in traditional IAM:
- Siloed visibility: PAM sees privileged accounts, IGA sees governance, directories see authentication. Nobody sees everything
- Missing context: Tools know an account exists but not why, who owns it, or what it’s for
- Manual processes: Teams can’t manually track thousands of machine identities across hundreds of systems
- Static snapshots: By the time an audit completes, the environment has already changed
- Human-centric design: Built for predictable human behavior, not 24/7 machine activity
The fundamental issue? Traditional IAM manages credentials, not identities. It’s like having a DMV that tracks driver’s licenses but has no record of actual drivers. Without understanding the identity behind the credential, you’re making security decisions blind.
This is exactly why Gartner introduced IVIP as a new category.
What Is IVIP and How Does It Solve These Problems?
IVIP provides the visibility and intelligence that traditional IAM lacks, creating a comprehensive view of all identities across your environment. It’s not a replacement. It’s the intelligence layer that makes your existing tools effective.
IVIP operates on three fundamental pillars:
- Visibility: Continuous discovery of all identities across every system: on-premises, cloud, SaaS, databases, infrastructure
- Intelligence: Context and analysis that answers critical questions. Who owns this? What’s the risk? Is this normal?
- Governance: Automated remediation and policy enforcement without disrupting operations
Unlike traditional IAM that operates in silos, IVIP provides a single pane of glass across your entire identity ecosystem. It fills in the gaps left by traditional IAM, uncovering the vast majority of identities they miss—including hidden, orphaned, and non-human accounts.. It maps ownership to orphaned accounts. It understands relationships and dependencies.
What IVIP specifically addresses:
- Discovers all identities and credentials, not just the ones in directories
- Establishes ownership for orphaned accounts
- Provides context for risk-based decisions
- Enables continuous identity hygiene
- Bridges the gaps between existing IAM tools
IVIP transforms identity management from reactive credential management to proactive identity governance. And with AI agents emerging, this evolution becomes critical.
How Do AI Agents Create New Identity Risks?
AI agents aren’t just more service accounts. They’re autonomous entities that make decisions, adapt behavior, and can even create other identities. This fundamentally changes the identity security equation.
Traditional machine identities execute predefined tasks. AI agents are different:
- Autonomous decision-making: They determine their own actions based on goals
- Adaptive behavior: They learn and change their patterns over time
- Identity creation: They can spawn temporary identities for specific tasks
- Privilege escalation: They may request elevated access based on their analysis
- Unpredictable patterns: Their behavior doesn’t follow traditional monitoring rules
Consider an AI agent analyzing customer data. It needs database access, can modify records, and makes autonomous decisions about what to access and when. How do you govern an identity that’s essentially thinking for itself?
The paradox: AI agents are both critical business enablers and potential attack vectors. Organizations are deploying thousands of AI identities without governance frameworks to manage them. Without Identity Intelligence, these autonomous entities operate in the shadows.
This is why IVIP and identity hygiene have become essential, not optional.
The Future of Identity Intelligence
The path forward isn’t about implementing new tools. It’s about fundamentally rethinking how we understand and govern identity. Organizations that distinguish between identities and credentials will thrive. Those that don’t will struggle with increasing breaches and compliance failures.
Identity Intelligence enables a future where:
- Every identity has a clear owner and purpose
- Risk is understood in real-time, not quarterly audits
- Machine identities are governed as carefully as human ones
- AI agents operate within defined security boundaries
- Identity hygiene is continuous, not a project
The distinction between identity and credentials isn’t semantic. It’s foundational. Your driver’s license proves you can drive, but without knowing who’s actually behind the wheel, you’re just hoping for the best.
In the world of identity security, hope isn’t a strategy. IVIP and Identity Intelligence represent the evolution from managing credentials to governing identities. As machine identities multiply and AI agents proliferate, this intelligence isn’t just valuable. It’s essential for survival.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Identity Intelligence? Identity Intelligence is the practice of continuously analyzing identity data to surface risk and strengthen control. It transforms fragmented identity information into actionable insights, enabling smarter, faster security decisions.
How does IVIP differ from traditional IAM? IVIP provides the intelligence layer across all identity systems, while traditional IAM focuses on specific functions within silos. IVIP doesn’t replace IAM. It makes it effective by providing comprehensive visibility and context.
What are service accounts and why are they risky? Service accounts are non-human identities used by applications to authenticate and perform automated tasks. They’re risky because they often have elevated privileges, no clear owner, operate 24/7, and multiply rapidly across systems.
What are the main blind spots in IAM? The major blind spots include orphaned accounts without owners, service accounts outside directories, shadow identities created outside governance, and cross-system relationships that span multiple tools. Traditional IAM operates in silos and misses these gaps.
How can organizations discover all service accounts? Effective discovery requires continuous scanning beyond just directories, including application configurations, scheduled tasks, and scripts. Automated IVIP solutions can identify service accounts wherever they hide and establish ownership through forensic analysis.
What is identity hygiene? Identity hygiene is the continuous practice of maintaining clean, well-governed identities across your environment. It includes removing stale accounts, establishing ownership, right-sizing permissions, and ensuring every identity serves a legitimate purpose.
Why are AI identities harder to secure than human ones? Machine identities operate 24/7, can execute thousands of operations per second, don’t follow human behavior patterns, often have elevated privileges that never expire, and lack the oversight that human identities receive.
How does IVIP help with AI governance? IVIP provides visibility into AI agent identities, tracks their behavior patterns, enforces security boundaries, and ensures they operate within defined parameters. It’s essential for governing autonomous entities that make their own decisions.
Interested in learning how SPHEREboard delivers Identity Intelligence through IVIP? Visit sphereco.com to discover how we’re pioneering identity hygiene for the modern enterprise.
