For 20+ years, Active Directory was the center of enterprise identity.
If you controlled AD, you controlled:
- Access
- Permissions
- Admin rights
- Privilege escalation
- The blast radius of a breach
Security teams built entire programs around protecting it.
But something has changed.
Today, your most critical identity control plane is no longer Active Directory.
It’s your SaaS ecosystem.And most organizations aren’t governing it.
The Identity Perimeter Has Moved Quietly
In the past:
- Access decisions were centralized.
- Privileges were managed in one place.
- Admin accounts were visible.
- Group memberships were auditable.
Now?
Access lives inside:
- Google Workspace
- Microsoft 365
- Salesforce
- Slack
- Jira
- GitHub
- Workday
- Notion
- Zoom
- Hundreds of smaller SaaS tools
Each app has:
- Its own admin model
- Its own permissions
- Its own OAuth system
- Its own API tokens
- Its own "super admins"
Your identity perimeter didn't disappear.It fragmented.
Most Breaches Don't Start in AD Anymore
Modern breaches increasingly involve:
- Compromised SaaS admin accounts
- Abused OAuth integrations
- Long-lived API tokens
- Shadow SaaS apps
- Over-privileged cloud roles
- Stale collaboration access
- Forgotten automation accounts
These don't always show up in your traditional IAM dashboards.
Because IAM still focuses on:
- Authentication
- SSO
- Conditional access
- Directory sync
Meanwhile, the real power sits inside SaaS applications.
SaaS Admins Are the New Domain Admins
Think about it:
- A global admin in Microsoft 365
- A workspace owner in Google
- An org admin in GitHub
- A billing admin in Salesforce
These roles control:
- Data access
- Security settings
- Token generation
- User lifecycle
- Compliance posture
But ask most companies:
"How many SaaS admins do we have?"
Silence. That's the problem.
IAM Alone Can't Solve This
Traditional IAM answers:
- Who authenticated?
- Did MFA succeed?
- Is the device trusted?
It rarely answers:
- Who owns each SaaS app?
- Who is admin inside it?
- Are there excessive permissions?
- Are there orphaned admin roles?
- Which apps are unsanctioned?
- Who approved OAuth grants?
- Are unused licenses still active?
Authentication without application governance is incomplete.
SaaS Governance Is the New Identity Battleground
The next evolution of IAM isn’t about stronger login.
It’s about:
- Application discovery
- Ownership mapping
- Admin visibility
- Privilege governance
- OAuth lifecycle control
- Non-human identity oversight
- Continuous access review
This is why Enterprise Application Governance (EAG) is emerging as a necessary layer.
Because SaaS is now the real control plane.
The Dangerous Assumption
Most security programs still assume:
“If access is behind SSO, we’re safe.”
But SSO only protects the door.
It does not protect:
- What’s happening inside the app
- Who became admin last month
- Which token was created yesterday
- Whether that integration still needs access
- Whether that workspace should even exist
That’s where breaches hide.
The New Identity Reality
Your SaaS stack is now:
- Your directory
- Your privilege system
- Your data plane
- Your automation layer
- Your integration backbone
And yet it's governed separately or not at all.
The companies that recognize this shift early will:
- Reduce blast radius
- Detect identity drift faster
- Pass audits with confidence
- Eliminate shadow risk
- Protect AI and automation environments
- Operate with real visibility
The rest will discover it during an incident.
Final Thought
Active Directory used to be the crown jewel.
Now your SaaS ecosystem is.
And if you're not governing it like one,
you're running modern infrastructure with legacy assumptions.
Identity didn't disappear. It just moved.
The question is : did your governance move with it?
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