“Identity is the new perimeter.” It’s the default mantra of the cloud era—and for good reason. With remote work, SaaS sprawl, and distributed infrastructure, users, apps, and data now live everywhere. Identity is the one constant security teams can anchor to. But here's the catch: If identity is the perimeter, then access governance is your firewall. And for most orgs? That firewall is full of open ports.
What Do We Mean by “Open Ports”?
Every excessive entitlement. Every stale account. Every unused group membership.
That contractor who left six months ago but still has admin rights in Okta? Open port.
That over-permissioned service account sitting idle? Open port.
Access may be invisible, but its risks aren’t. And far too many teams don’t know how wide their blast radius really is.
The Governance Gap
At Identiverse last week, one theme came up again and again: “We have identity tooling, but we’re not governing all of it.” SSO, MFA, conditional access—these are table stakes. They secure the front door. But what happens after a user gets in? That’s where most programs fall short.
Many orgs are running what we’d call “IGA Lite.” Some reviews here. A custom workflow there. But visibility is siloed, access reviews are manual, and decisions lack context. This isn’t about blaming overwhelmed teams—it’s about naming the pattern. Governance has become the firewall we forgot.
Context Is the New Control Plane
To secure the access layer, we need to move from static rules to adaptive decisions.
It's time to ask:
You don’t need 12 overlapping tools. You need clarity—a unified model that brings identity, access, and context together in one place.
Identity is the perimeter. But governance is what determines how far the blast spreads.
Stop leaving the ports wide open.
See Clarity’s Access Review Platform