Identity and Access Management (IAM) is no longer just a nice-to-have. It’s become a business-critical function, a foundational capability that underpins secure, scalable, and efficient operations. Yet many organizations encounter common pitfalls that stall and trap progress and compromise outcomes. With decades of combined IAM experience, our team knows these traps and pitfalls like the back of their hand and can help you anticipate and navigate them.

We categorized these pitfalls in five domains:

• strategic vision, business case and planning
• governance and ownership
• ongoing commitment and programmatic approach
• technical flexibility and adaptability
• budget, resources, and realistic expectations
  

This article archives a series we did on LinkedIn not too long ago, on what some common IAM Traps and Pitfalls are and tips on how to remedy (/avoid) them, including a bonus tip under “Ongoing commitment and programmatic approach”. This way you have all of the information in one place. Easier, no? Enjoy!

Link to LinkedIn carousel 

• IAM Vision, goals, and strategy 
  • Trap/Pitfall: Lack of a clear vision, goal, and strategy. Many organizations dive into IAM with the best intentions but without clear direction. This can lead to scope creep, lack of focus and rising costs. 
  • Remedied by: Be clear on your vision, goal and strategy! Only plan your journey with a clear destination – know what you aim to realize, why and how to do that before you start.   

• IAM too complex? Think again!  
  • Trap/Pitfall: Considering IAM as too complex. IAM is often seen as overwhelmingly complex. This can discourage commitment and lead to stalling progress.   
  • Remedied by: Decompose, decomplexify and phase steps over time. What steps do you need to take to realize your goals? Breaking your initiatives into manageable phases helps reduce complexity and maintain momentum. 

• Budget, funding and business buy-in 
  • Trap/Pitfall: Allocating little or no budget for IAM. IAM initiatives suffer from underfunding and incomplete implementation without adequate financial planning and buy-in.   
  • Remedied by: Secure budget buy-in with a positive IAM business case. Emphasize IAM’s value as an enabler of security, operational efficiency and innovation to ensure you can give IAM the resources it deserves.
    

• Rethinking business priorities 
  • Trap/Pitfall: IAM is given low business priority. Deprioritizing IAM compared to other business initiatives leads to gaps in identity management, access control and security. 
  • Remedied by: IAM as strategic business enabler. Create wide-spread awareness around the strategic value of IAM for your organization to build organizational support, rally the essential business buy-in and secure funding.
    

Tip! Our article “IAM as strategic accelerator – thriving confidently in the digital age” might just be interesting further reading.

These were some of the more common IAM traps and pitfalls we see in the domain of strategic vision, business case and planning, and tips to remedy them.  

Up next: 2/5 – governance and ownership. See you there! 

Link to LinkedIn carousel

• No one owns IAM.. Or do they?  
  • Trap/Pitfall: Lack of IAM ownership. IAM often remains under IT even though its reach and impact is much broader than that. This, and/or failing to assign clear responsibility can result in insufficient accountability. 
  • Remedied by: Securing essential business buy-in. Engage key business stakeholders from the start. Involve those who will be affected by IAM initiatives and ensure they understand IAM enables organizational resilience so that they want to take ownership.

• What is your IAM Vision, Goal and Strategy?  
  • Trap/Pitfall: No or insufficient governance. Without defined governance structures, IAM can become hard to manage. Risks include inconsistent policies, inefficient workflows and oversight gaps. 
  • Remedied by: Implement a structured governance framework. Establish clear policies, roles and responsibilities. This ensures consistent decision-making, efficient workflows and long-term oversight. 

• IAM is ongoing, it is not a one-off project.  
  • Trap/Pitfall: IAM is a one-off IT project. Approaching IAM as only an IT initiative or project, it ignores the need for organization-wide, cross-departmental involvement and business insights. 
  • Remedied by: considering IAM is a continuous responsibility, not just a project. IAM should not be confined to IT. It is the backbone of your business, like financial management, and should be treated as ongoing responsibility with accountability and ownership across departments, and a dedicated IAM team.

• Clarity on certification goals  
  • Trap/Pitfall: Certification campaign reports are ignored or poorly reviewed. Managers in this instance can lack clarity on the purpose and workings of certification campaigns. This could lead to poor data quality in workforce administration and increase risk exposure, which in turn may undermine identity governance programs. 
  • Remedied by: Communicate roles to secure manager buy-in. Emphasize that – as managers are accountable for their direct reports – reviewing and certifying workforce data is part of their core responsibilities. Provide guidance to ensure they understand campaign purpose and objectives and feel confident about their role in it.
    

These were some of the more common IAM traps and pitfalls we see in the domain of governance and ownership, and tips to remedy them.  

Up next: 3/5 – ongoing commitment and programmatic approach.  

Let’s continue! 

Link to LinkedIn carousel

• IAM is long-term and here to stay!  
  • Trap/Pitfall: IAM implementation is approached as one-time effort, a project. Treating IAM as a one-off project leads to sustainability issues, making it hard to successfully sustain essential IAM efforts once the project ends. 
  • Remedied by: Embracing IAM as long-term, like a program. It’s here to stay! At the very least, pivoting to an IAM-aligned strategy is a multi-year effort. Embrace it as such to improve planning and resources and optimize your results and the return on investments made.  

• Rally support and create awareness 
  • Trap/Pitfall: Lack of IAM awareness with key stakeholders. Stakeholders often underestimate the importance and added value of IAM compared to other business critical priorities, leading to low engagement, understanding and buy-in.  
  • Remedied by: Position and promote IAM as an enabler with a positive business case. This strengthens its position, underscoring its value in enabling efficient, scalable and secure operations, helps rally ongoing support from business-wide stakeholders. 

• Reshape business operations 
  • Trap/Pitfall: Underestimating IAM’s culture & change impact. IAM can reshape business operations and bring along serious organizational change components. Underestimating this can lead to resistance and challenges in embedding IAM practices. 
  • Remedied by: Factor in organizational change and cultural adaptation. First, be transparent and honest about the changes a sound IAM strategy brings. Then integrate change management principles into your plans to build a supportive environment.  

BONUS! We added an additional trap/pitfall to this domain: the often-lacking, long-term, in-house IAM expertise:  

• Trap/Pitfall: Lack of knowledge and experience in IAM, or existing knowledge and experience is only temporary. In many organizations IAM programs and procurement processes don’t end the way they were anticipated. This can be because of incorrect requirements, a too narrow or too broad scope, and business-to-IT misalignment. 
• Remedied by: Make sure that the right stakeholders are involved, and that you have sufficient long-term, in-house IAM expertise. Not a person, but a team! Connect to IAM communities (IDPro, Identibeer) and find professional experienced external consultants and business partners. But remember, while this external expertise can help you set things up and tackle specific issues and challenges as you grow and evolve, in the end the goal is to make IAM an embedded, core, and foundational part of your organization.
  

These were some of the more common IAM traps and pitfalls we see in the domain of ongoing commitment and programmatic approach, tips on how to remedy and even prevent them.  

Up next: 4/5 – technical flexibility and adaptability.  

And so, on we go!  

As we’re moving through the five domains of IAM Traps and Pitfalls, these are the ones we see in our fourth category, ‘Technical Flexibility and Adaptability.’ Each trap is again paired with a tip to help you prevent/remedy them. Let’s dive in!  

Link to LinkedIn carousel

• RBAC, ABAC, PBAC .. All the BACs?  
  • Trap/Pitfall: Choosing between BACs. Some organizations feel they must pick between role-based access control (RBAC), attribute-based access control (ABAC), or any other x-based access controls. This can lead to structures that are more rigid than they need to be and minimized options for flexibility. 
  • Remedied by: Balance and combine the BACs! 1+1=3. You don’t need to choose only one BAC. For instance, start with a solid RBAC foundation and supplement with ABAC if needed and possible. Such a flexible strategy allows for a more nuanced approach to access management. Short-term and long-term. 
    

Tip! Have a read at our article “Evolution of Access Control: a bit of RBAC and ABAC history” on LinkedIn.  

• IAM organization and ownership 
  • Trap/Pitfall: IAM belongs to HR. Over-reliance on HR for access management can result in limited flexibility, especially in complex organizations. HR departments often lack the specialized resources, tools, and mandate to manage dynamic IAM effectively.  
  • Remedied by: IAM is a shared organizational responsibility. Effective IAM finds ownership across departments (e.g. IT, compliance, business units). Align HR’s role in IAM with broader goals to approach it as a shared responsibility.

• A case for dynamic authorizations 
  • Trap/Pitfall: Authorizations are based on position alone. In the dynamic nature of the modern workplace, position-based authorizations may be too static. Access management needs are increasingly task-, mandate- and context-based. Overlooking that can lead to access gaps, unnecessary privileges and risks.  
  • Remedied by: A dynamic approach to authorizations. Given that the context around access can shift, there’s value in designing your authorization framework to be dynamic (e.g. task- and mandate-based). This helps you ensure access rights align with actual responsibilities and activities, reduce risks and improve operational efficiency.

• More than one way to an IAM solution 
  • Trap/Pitfall: Building your own IAM solution by default. Strong technical expertise can lead organizations to custom-built IAM solutions by default, risking misalignments, dependencies, higher costs, limited scalability, and resource strains. Especially without a framework connecting governance and security to business needs and goals. 
  • Remedied by: The “Reuse before Buy before Build”-principle. Leverage existing solutions whenever possible. See what you already have and how that could be used. Consider buy tools only to fill gaps and only build custom solutions if your organization has unique, well-defined requirements that cannot be addressed otherwise.

• Stairs are climbed one step at a time 
  • Trap/Pitfall: Choosing a Big Bang IAM Implementation. Attempting a large-scale, immediate IAM rollout and implementation often results in errors, a lot of resistance, poor adoption, and strained resources. All of this can undermine your entire IAM initiative – both currently and ahead in the future. 
  • Remedied by: Phased, flexible, step-by-step implementation. Break down your IAM implementation into manageable phases. Breaking up a complex, large IAM program into chunks and smaller projects like this helps to reduce risks, ensure gradual adoption, and allows iterative improvements while maintaining business continuity. 

These were some of the more common IAM traps and pitfalls we see in the domain of technical flexibility and adaptability, tips on how to remedy and even prevent them.  

Up next: 5/5 – budget, resources and realistic expectations. 

Did we save the best for last? Let’s find out!  

This fifth and last post concludes our series on common IAM Traps and Pitfalls. Last, yes. But not least. Take a look at what we consider them to be for our final category, ‘Budget, Resources and Realistic expectations.’ 

Link to LinkedIn carousel 

• IAM requires multi-year commitment  
  • Trap/Pitfall: Underestimating IAM cost and commitment. Cost and commitment for IAM are often underestimated, as it’s mistakenly treated as just another tool to purchase and a one-time expenditure. Approaching IAM as merely a one-time expenditure can lead to ineffective planning, resource strains or even shortages. 
  • Remedied by: Educate stakeholders and build awareness. Regularly and consistently inform stakeholders about IAM’s long-term value to secure continued prioritization and funding. A robust business case for IAM that shows how it impacts both security and operational efficiency over time helps to structure this.

• Focusing on the future benefits  
  • Trap/Pitfall: Resistance to replacing existing systems. Your older IAM systems, though functional in the past, may become technical debt at some point, hindering modern operations. Changing them may be resisted due to past investments, leading inefficiencies, compliance gaps, and security risks. 
  • Remedied by: Focus on the future and treat early investments as sunk cost. Focus on future benefits rather than dwelling on past investments, encouraging adaptability and inquisitiveness to finding new IAM solutions that enhance security & compliance, and support innovation and operational efficiency.

• IAM is a high-priority initiative   
  • Trap/Pitfall: IAM is considered a low-priority initiative. We see that IAM frequently competes with other organizational priorities. More often than not, IAM does not make it into the top lists. This de-prioritization of IAM can lead to inconsistent funding and support and suboptimal results. 
  • Remedied by: Reframe IAM as strategic business enabler. It helps to position IAM in your organization as critical for operational resilience, compliance, innovation and growth. With consistent efforts, this may allow IAM to shift from a competing initiative to an integrated business priority.
    

• Alignment is key for effective IAM   
  • Trap/Pitfall: Lack of alignment with other initiatives and programs. IAM is almost never the only program running in an organization. But because IAM is sometimes approached in isolation, lack of alignment to other programs and initiatives can lead to conflicting priorities and resource allocation. 
  • Remedied by: A thorough and robust IAM business case. Designing such a business case before your initiatives take off may help ensure stakeholder buy-in and sufficient funding. This process requires openness and communication, which might also help to align your IAM initiatives to other running programs. 

These were some of the more common IAM traps and pitfalls we see in the domain of budget, resources, and realistic expectations, tips on how to remedy and even prevent them. 

You made it! All the way till the end.

If you’re reading this, that means you made it all the way through our traps & pitfalls article! If that’s not commitment .. So, for those of you who have been following this series and its posts – thanks for joining! We hope you found value and insights in them that may help strengthen and streamline your IAM initiatives. Should you ever need any help? Our team, with decades of combined IAM experience, knows these traps, pitfalls and their remedies like the back of their hand and can help you anticipate and navigate them successfully. Imagine beginning your IAM journey with a head start and with a breeze in the back! Feel free to reach out to us (info@sonicbee.eu) to discuss what that could look like for your situation. 

At SonicBee, we help businesses balance innovation and security, ensuring compliant, scalable, and sustainable digital transformation, so that yours can thrive confidently in the digital age. Our tailored IAM consulting and solutions streamline operations, engage stakeholders, and protect critical data. We bring decades of combined IAM experience and expertise among our colleagues and team, and an exclusive partnership with one of the most innovative IAM solutions on the market, to making IAM accessible, strategic, and helping you with compliance with regulatory standards. From strategy and architecture to roadmaps, from program and change management to implementation, we’re your partner for all things IAM.