Why Access Management Still Eats 80% Of IT Time

If you lead IT, Security, Compliance, or ops, you already know the pattern.

A new hire starts Monday. Someone needs emergency access for a customer issue. A manager approves the wrong role. A contractor leaves and their accounts linger. An auditor asks a simple question and your team spends two days collecting screenshots.

None of this is “hard” work. It is relentless work.

Access management still takes over the calendar because access is being created and changed across too many tools, by too many people, with too little shared structure. The result is constant follow-ups, constant cleanup, and constant evidence hunts.

Access Work Scales With SaaS Sprawl And Shadow AI

A decade ago, “access management” mostly meant an active directory plus SSO plus a few core apps.

Most mid-market companies now run well over 100 SaaS applications, plus a growing number of AI tools and agents.

Each one brings its own roles, permission models, invite links, tokens, and admin consoles. None of them agree on how access should work.

That alone explains why access work keeps expanding. Every new tool adds another surface area that someone has to track, clean up, and prove during audits.

Then GenAI added another layer. Verizon’s 2025 DBIR executive summary notes that 15% of employees routinely accessed GenAI systems on corporate devices, and many did it outside normal corporate identity controls. It also reports that among those accessing GenAI services, 72% used non-corporate emails, and 17% used corporate emails without integrated authentication. Source: Verizon 2025 DBIR Executive Summary. 

This is why access work expands even in “modern” stacks. The stack is not one thing. It is a moving pile of apps, agents, logins, groups, tokens, shared accounts, and exceptions.

If you want a clean way to frame the goal, use this phrase: One system of record for all access. It is the only way the rest becomes manageable.

Basic Access Issues Still Fill The Queue

One of the most common access issues is still credential and login trouble.

While password resets are often cited as a top help desk driver, the deeper issue is broader. Employees struggle to access tools that sit outside the IdP, tools that were never fully integrated, or tools adopted faster than IT can keep up.

SSO helps, but it does not solve access sprawl when large parts of the stack live beyond central identity controls.

Joiner Mover Leaver Work Never Stays “Automated”

Most teams have some onboarding automation. It usually works for a subset of the stack.

Then reality hits:

• A new team adopts a tool without telling IT.
• A role change happens and old access is never removed.
• A contractor needs access that does not match a clean template.
• A tool has no clean provisioning path so someone does it by hand.

This is why Joiner Mover Leaver never becomes “set and forget.” It becomes “set and then babysit.”

If you need a concrete, audit-friendly way to describe the scope of the lifecycle problem, this is useful language: Joiner Mover Leaver workflows. 

For the practical fix, the important detail is coverage beyond the IdP: Auto provisioning and deprovisioning, ideally paired with ongoing access sync so your inventory does not rot.

Access Reviews Create Quarterly Audit Debt

Access reviews break down for one simple reason: reviewers lack context.

Managers are asked to approve or revoke access without knowing:

• What the tool is used for
• What the permission actually allows
• Whether the access is still needed for the person’s role

Even Cakewalk’s own access review guide calls out that manual reviews via spreadsheets, tickets, and email threads are time-consuming and error-prone.

That same guide also ties access reviews directly to compliance requirements such as ISO 27001 and SOC reports.

Want to see what access reviews look like when they are not a spreadsheet project? Try Cakewalk’s User Access Review Software to centralize reviewers, decisions, and evidence in one place so reviews take hours, not weeks.

Onboarding is hard. Offboarding is even harder.

Granting access is often one decision.

Removing access is a scavenger hunt.

That is why offboarding is where time and risk collide. You are not only trying to be fast. You are trying to be complete across apps you might not even know exist.

Surveys on ex-employee access vary, but they consistently point to a stubborn problem: former employees often retain access longer than teams expect. For example, Beyond Identity reported 83% of respondents still had access to some digital assets of a previous employer.

That is why offboarding done cannot mean IdP deactivated. It has to mean “access removed everywhere that matters.”

A practical starting point is Automated onboarding and offboarding tied to HR events and backed by reliable app discovery. 

Audit Evidence Collection Is The Hidden Project

Ask a Security or Compliance leader what makes audits feel painful and you will hear the same word: evidence.

Not policy writing. Not control design. Evidence.

Access reviews exist to prevent the kinds of gaps that later turn into incidents.

IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 puts numbers behind what happens when access is not reviewed, removed, or understood in time. The report cites a $4.4M global average cost per breach and calls out governance gaps around AI as a growing source of exposure.

Verizon’s 2025 DBIR executive summary shows where those gaps often live. The share of breaches involving third parties doubled from 15% to 30%, reflecting access that exists outside core systems, is granted once, and then forgotten.

The time drain shows up when you cannot answer basic questions quickly:

• Who had access
• Who approved it
• What changed
• When it was removed

Audit-ready access logs should be a by-product of daily work, not a separate reporting effort. If you want an example of that positioning, see Access control management and audits. 

Why This Hits COOs As Much As CISOs

CISOs and Compliance leaders feel the risk.

COOs feel the friction.

Access chaos slows the company down in quiet ways:

• New hires lose days getting set up
• Internal moves take too long
• Teams buy tools to bypass slow access flows
• Customer security questionnaires drag deals
• Audits pull senior people into evidence cleanup

This is why Identity Governance becomes an operations problem, not a security program.

A useful way to explain the human side is employee participation. Access issues are created at the edges of the org, not in the admin console.

‍

How Teams Get Back Time Without Becoming The Access Police

Most teams do not need a bigger access team. They need a system built for how access actually works today.

‍

In practice, that means three things.

1. Full Visibility And Access Data Consolidation

1. Full Visibility And Access Data Consolidation
   You need one place that shows every app, AI tool, identity, and permission. Managed and unmanaged. Human and non-human. Without this, everything else is guesswork.
2. Automated Access Control Workflows
   Onboarding, offboarding, access requests, and reviews should not rely on memory or manual follow-ups. Automation removes inconsistency and frees IT teams from babysitting access.
3. Audit Evidence In Real Time
   Access logs, approvals, and changes should be captured as a by-product of daily work. Not reconstructed later under audit pressure.

When these three pieces are in place, access work stops expanding with every new hire, tool, or audit.

The Simple Reason Access Still Eats The Week

Access management eats the week because the stack keeps changing, and most identity tools only cover part of the picture. 

Cakewalk pulls all identities, access, apps and AI agents into one system of record, then automates access requests, reviews, onboarding, and offboarding so teams cut busy work and stay audit-ready. 

See Cakewalk in action and how modern teams manage access without the busy work.