Identity is now the control plane of the enterprise. But identity without controlled entitlements quickly becomes a liability.
A decade ago, access was binary. A user either had access to an application or they did not. Today, every SaaS app, cloud service, and data platform exposes thousands of granular permissions. A single enterprise can easily manage 40,000+ entitlements across SaaS, cloud infrastructure, and data systems.
As organizations adopted SaaS, cloud, APIs, and automation, access models became:
The result is identity sprawl: identities (human and non-human) accumulate permissions faster than organizations can govern them. Roles become bloated, groups obscure real access, and access reviews devolve into checkbox exercises designed to satisfy auditors rather than reduce risk.
An entitlement is a specific right or permission granted to an identity. Not just who can log in, but what exactly they can do once inside a system.
An entitlement management system is the central layer that:
This guide explains how entitlement management works, where it fits relative to IGA and CIEM, and how enterprises should evaluate solutions.
Effective entitlement management depends on a precise, shared vocabulary. Without clear definitions, access governance degrades into guesswork, spreadsheets, and over-privileged identities.
Modern access models connect identities (also referred sometimes as accounts or users) to resources through permissions, often abstracted using roles, groups, and permission sets.
An identity represents a user or service account in your environment. Today, its widely extended to non human identities such as bots, API keys, tokens etc as well as AI agents.
Each identity accumulates entitlements over time, which must be continuously governed.
A resource represents the asset or service an identity can access.
Resources define what is being accessed and are central to risk evaluation.
A permission is the atomic action an identity can perform on a resource.
Examples:
Permissions are the smallest unit of access and the primary source of over-privilege.
A role is a logical abstraction that groups permissions based on a job function or responsibility.
Roles improve usability, but over time they tend to accumulate permissions that are no longer required, making role-based access alone insufficient.
A group is a collection of identities, not permissions.
Groups are frequently combined with roles or permission sets, which can obscure true entitlement exposure.
A permission set is a defined collection of permissions that can be assigned to identities or groups.
Because permission sets stack over time, entitlement-level visibility is critical to prevent privilege creep.
These capabilities operate at different layers.
These definitions overlap quite a bit. Modern platforms combine both: governance workflows powered by entitlement-level intelligence.
CIEM addresses infrastructure risk. SaaS entitlements address business risk and compliance exposure, which often go unnoticed. Enterprises need both.
Manual spreadsheets and screenshots do not scale.
Entitlement management enables:
Standing privileges are one of the largest contributors to breach impact.
With JIT access:
This dramatically reduces attack surface and lateral movement risk.
Most access risk originates from lifecycle failures.
Entitlement-aware lifecycle automation ensures:
The entitlement management landscape spans multiple categories. Each category solves a different primary problem and comes with distinct tradeoffs around cost, complexity, and time to value.
BalkanID represents a modern entitlement-first approach designed to close the gap between lightweight tools and heavyweight legacy IGA platforms.
BalkanID is frequently selected by buyers looking for the best balance across cost, speed, and enterprise depth.
At the entry level, BalkanID provides:
For larger or more complex environments, BalkanID scales into:
This dual-mode model allows organizations to start fast and scale deep without re-platforming.
Key differentiator:
BalkanID delivers rapid time to value and lower cost while still supporting enterprise-grade customization typically associated with legacy IGA.
ConductorOne and Opal focus primarily on streamlining access requests, particularly for engineering and cloud-native teams.
ConductorOne emphasizes:
Opal targets similar use cases but favors:
Both platforms are strong when access velocity and developer UX are the primary objectives. However, buyers should note that:
Key differentiator:
Excellent access request experience, limited entitlement governance depth.
Zluri and Lumos are designed for SaaS visibility and cost optimization, not entitlement governance.
These platforms are commonly adopted by IT and procurement teams to:
While they provide useful visibility into application access, they generally lack:
As a result, SaaS ops platforms are typically complementary to entitlement management solutions rather than substitutes.
Key differentiator:
Cost and SaaS inventory optimization over security governance.
Okta Entitlement Management extends Okta Identity Governance for organizations standardized on Okta.
It works best when:
For organizations with complex SaaS, data, and custom environments, deeper entitlement governance may require additional tools.
Key differentiator:
Tight IdP integration, limited cross-platform entitlement depth.
Microsoft Entra includes entitlement management via Access Packages within Entra ID Governance.
It is best suited for:
Flexibility diminishes as environments expand beyond the Microsoft stack.
Key differentiator:
Strong native Azure integration, limited multi-SaaS flexibility.
SailPoint and Saviynt represent traditional IGA.
They are typically chosen by very large enterprises with:
Buyers should plan for:
Key differentiator:
Maximum configurability at the cost of speed and simplicity.
Most organizations do not fail at access governance because they lack workflows. They fail because they lack entitlement-level visibility and prioritization.
Buyers should favor platforms that reduce real access risk quickly, scale with organizational complexity, and align cost with value—rather than forcing a choice between simplicity and enterprise capability.
Successful entitlement management programs are rarely the result of a single deployment or policy decision. They evolve through a series of deliberate, practical steps that balance risk reduction with operational reality. Teams that attempt to “boil the ocean” often stall; teams that sequence the work correctly see measurable impact within weeks.
Entitlement management is most effective when treated as an ongoing capability, not a one-time project. Organizations that follow this progression namely visibility, least privilege, lifecycle automation, and continuous review, consistently reduce access risk while improving audit readiness and operational efficiency.
The key is sequencing. When teams address the right problems in the right order, entitlement governance becomes sustainable rather than burdensome.
The following four steps reflect how mature organizations approach entitlement governance in practice.
Step 1: Discover Dark Entitlements
Start with visibility. Identify orphan accounts, dormant permissions, and indirect access paths.
Every program starts with visibility. Most organizations underestimate how much access exists outside of formal roles and approvals. Orphan accounts, dormant permissions, and indirect access inherited through groups or permission sets tend to accumulate quietly over time. These “dark entitlements” rarely surface during periodic reviews because they are spread across systems and obscured by abstraction layers.
The initial objective is not to fix everything, but to establish a reliable inventory of:
This baseline is what allows teams to move from assumptions to evidence. Without it, every downstream decision is guesswork.
Step 2: Enforce Least Privilege
Use usage and behavior data to recommend safe revocations and reduce standing access.
Once visibility exists, the next challenge is deciding what can be safely removed. Least privilege is not about aggressively revoking access; it is about aligning permissions to actual business need. Usage and behavior data play a critical role here. Permissions that have not been exercised in months, or that no longer align with a person’s role, represent low-risk opportunities for cleanup.
Teams that succeed at this step focus on:
Done correctly, this step reduces risk without disrupting productivity, and it builds confidence in the governance process.
Step 3: Automate the Mover Workflow
Ensure job changes automatically revoke old entitlements and assign new, role-appropriate access.
Joiners and leavers are usually handled well. Movers are not. When employees change roles, departments, or responsibilities, access rarely keeps pace. Old entitlements linger, new ones are layered on, and privilege accumulates invisibly. Over time, this creates some of the highest-risk identities in the organization.
Automating the mover workflow ensures that access evolves with responsibility. When a change occurs, entitlements tied to the previous role are revoked, and only the access required for the new role is granted.
This step is less about speed and more about correctness. It closes one of the most common gaps in access governance and prevents privilege creep from becoming systemic.
Step 4: Continuous Review
Replace annual reviews with frequent, risk-based micro-reviews focused on high-impact entitlements.
Annual access reviews are necessary, but they are not sufficient. By the time a yearly certification occurs, access has already changed dozens of times. Reviewers are overwhelmed, context is missing, and the process devolves into rubber-stamping.
Mature programs shift toward continuous, risk-based reviews. Instead of asking managers to review everything at once, they surface small, targeted sets of high-risk entitlements on a regular cadence. Reviews become faster, decisions improve, and accountability increases.
The goal is not more reviews, but better ones, focused on the access that actually matters.
Selecting an entitlement management solution is less about feature checklists and more about long-term fit. The right choice depends on how quickly value needs to be delivered, how diverse the environment is, and how much operational overhead the organization can realistically support.
Buyers evaluating solutions should focus on three core dimensions: architecture, integrations, and pricing. Each has downstream implications for deployment speed, governance coverage, and total cost of ownership.
A strong entitlement management platform should fit naturally into the organization’s environment, provide deep visibility across critical systems, and scale economically as governance maturity increases.
By grounding selection decisions in architecture, integration depth, and pricing alignment, buyers can avoid tools that look compelling in isolation but become difficult to sustain in practice.
Architecture Fit
API-based solutions deploy faster and scale better for SaaS-heavy environments. Agent-based solutions may provide deeper infrastructure visibility but add operational overhead.
Architecture determines how quickly a solution can be deployed and how easily it can adapt as the environment evolves. API-based platforms generally deploy faster and scale more naturally in SaaS-heavy environments. They integrate directly with applications and cloud services, require minimal infrastructure, and are easier to extend as new systems are introduced. For organizations with distributed teams and frequent application changes, this model reduces operational friction.
Agent-based approaches can offer deeper visibility into certain infrastructure layers, particularly in highly customized or onprem environments. However, they also introduce additional components to manage, maintain, and secure. Over time, this operational overhead can slow adoption and limit coverage if agents are not consistently deployed or updated.
Buyers should evaluate architecture not just on technical capability, but on how well it aligns with their operating model and tolerance for ongoing maintenance.
Integrations
Ensure coverage for your critical systems, including AWS, GitHub, Salesforce, and key data platforms.
Entitlement management is only as effective as the systems it can see. At a minimum, solutions should support the organization’s most critical platforms, typically a combination of cloud providers, source code repositories, core SaaS applications, and data systems. Coverage gaps create blind spots, and blind spots quickly become risk.
Beyond breadth, buyers should also assess integration depth. It is one thing to know that a user has access to an application; it is another to understand which permissions, resources, and roles are involved. Deep integrations enable meaningful risk analysis and reduce the need for manual reconciliation.
A practical evaluation question is whether new applications can be onboarded quickly without custom development or long lead times.
Pricing Models
Common models include per-user pricing and per-resource or connector-based pricing. Buyers should ensure pricing aligns with visibility and risk reduction rather than discouraging broad coverage.
Pricing has a direct impact on how broadly entitlement management can be applied. Per-user pricing models are easy to understand but can discourage coverage of service accounts, external users, or automation identities. Per-resource or connector-based models can better reflect actual governance scope but may become unpredictable as environments grow.
The most important consideration is whether pricing aligns with risk reduction. If cost increases sharply as visibility expands, teams may be incentivized to limit coverage, undermining the purpose of entitlement management altogether.
Buyers should look for pricing structures that support broad visibility, encourage least privilege, and scale in line with real operational value rather than penalizing growth.
Entitlement management has moved from a niche capability to a foundational control. As permissions vastly outnumber identities, enterprises that rely solely on roles, groups, and periodic reviews will continue to accumulate hidden risk.
The right entitlement management platform delivers fast visibility, actionable risk insights, and continuous enforcement, turning identity from a liability back into a control plane.
A role is a logical container. An entitlement is the actual granular permission inside that role. Entitlement management software prevents role bloat over time.
IAM focuses on authentication. Entitlement management focuses on authorization, what identities can do once authenticated.
CIEM is a specialized category designed for AWS, Azure, and GCP that right-sizes permissions for humans and machines.
Yes. Modern platforms provide centralized visibility into GitHub roles, teams, and repository permissions.
Data entitlements control access to sensitive datasets. Orphaned access can lead to serious compliance violations.
It extends Okta Identity Governance to manage fine-grained permissions using entitlement policies.
Intelligent solutions analyze actual usage to identify risky or toxic permission combinations and recommend auto-revocation.
Yes. Microsoft Entra ID Governance includes entitlement management through Access Packages.
It provides a continuous audit trail of approvals and reviews, eliminating manual evidence collection.
JIT access grants entitlements only for a limited window and automatically revokes them, reducing attack surface.
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