Rewriting the IGA Playbook: Why Legacy Identity Governance Is Broken—and What Comes Next

By Tippu Gagguturu, CEO, SecurEnds

When I started SecurEnds, I wasn’t just building another security and compliance product—I was trying to solve a problem I had witnessed repeatedly: identity governance projects that overpromised, overspent, and ultimately underdelivered.

Before founding SecurEnds, I was a CTO at a big enterprise. I was in the room when vendors pitched a multiyear IGA deployment plan. I’ve heard from my fellow CIOs and CTOs in Fortune 500 companies justify multimillion-dollar spends on legacy identity platforms, only to discover a year later that basic onboarding workflows were still broken, entitlements were still scattered across shadow IT, and auditors were still demanding spreadsheets.

Let’s be honest—legacy IGA is broken.

Bloated deployments. Missed deadlines. Millions spent. And after all that?
Access reviews are still manual.
Service accounts are still out of scope.
Lifecycle events still rely on tribal knowledge and ticket queues.

This is not governance. This is gridlock.

So, why does this keep happening?

The traditional IGA vendors were built for a different era—an era where IT controlled everything, where identities lived in Active Directory, and where cloud adoption was an edge case, not the norm. Their platforms reflect that history: monolithic architectures, deeply rigid workflows, and a dependence on professional services that locks customers into years-long engagements.

And here’s the dirty secret: many IGA deployments never reach completion. Stakeholders change. Priorities shift. And the technical debt of the implementation itself becomes the next problem to manage.

I’ve seen global organizations run three different tools just to cobble together access reviews, access requests, and provisioning—because the platform that was supposed to do it all couldn’t keep up.

Which leads me to a question I pose to every CISO I meet:
Why are we still accepting this?

• Why does it take months to configure a user access review?

• Why do we still route critical access changes through ticket queues that nobody audits?

• Why are we governing engineers and marketers the same way we govern bots, contractors, and service accounts?

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Rethinking IGA for a Cloud-First, API-Driven World

At SecurEnds, we’ve taken a fundamentally different approach. We built our platform for the modern enterprise—not the 2005 version of it. That means three things:

Simplicity wins.
You don’t need 1,000 features you’ll never use. You need core capabilities that are intuitive, automated, and audit-ready from day one.

Speed is a feature.
SecurEnds can go live in weeks, not quarters. That’s not just a sales pitch—it’s our implementation model. We’ve helped publicly traded customers run their first user access reviews in under 30 days.

Govern everything.
Human identities. Non-human identities. On-prem. Cloud. Custom apps. Contractors. APIs. We provide visibility and governance across it all.

When you pair those principles with a SaaS-native architecture, the result is a platform that delivers outcomes, not just features.

From Spreadsheet Chaos to Review Confidence

Most organizations still conduct user access reviews in Excel. Let that sink in. For all the talk of zero trust and data security, our most basic governance process is still dependent on emailed spreadsheets and manager guesses.

SecurEnds automates entitlement reviews across systems—Active Directory, Salesforce, SAP, Workday, and more. We use role mining and access analytics to group common entitlements, making reviews smarter and less fatiguing.

Our Access Templates help managers evaluate access by function, not just by checkbox. If someone in Marketing has access outside their normal role bundle, you’ll know immediately.

We also support time-bound and just-in-time access—so temporary projects don’t become permanent backdoors.

Access Requests That Actually Work

Legacy access request portals are painful. Half the time, users don’t know what to request. The other half, the request gets routed into a ticket queue with no accountability.

SecurEnds changes that. Our Access Request Portal offers self-service flows that make sense. You can request roles, applications, or entitlements with built-in guardrails like SoD (Segregation of Duties) policies and pre-configured approval chains.

And here’s the kicker: provisioning isn’t manual.
Through our connector framework and SCIM-based T-Hub, requests can be automatically fulfilled in target systems—or routed with intelligent fallbacks if needed.

This is not just workflow orchestration. It’s access governance that works.

Governing the Ungovernable: Bots and Service Accounts

Most IGA platforms ignore non-human identities. We don’t.

In modern IT environments, service accounts outnumber human users by 3:1. These accounts run scripts, automate tasks, and interact with sensitive systems—yet they’re often invisible to traditional governance.

SecurEnds includes full lifecycle management for bots, APIs, and service accounts. We tie every identity to a system owner, expiration policy, and access trail. No more orphaned credentials sitting in your environment for years.

You get clear ownership, auditability, and decommissioning—for every identity, not just the easy ones.

Audit-Ready from Day One

Let’s talk compliance.

You shouldn’t have to wait six months to generate an audit report. SecurEnds offers real-time auditing from the moment you onboard. Every access decision, every review action, every approval path is logged, searchable, and exportable.

Whether it’s SOX, HIPAA, ISO 27001, or just internal scrutiny, we make you audit-ready without the fire drill.

Our customers tell us this one feature alone has saved them hundreds of hours per quarter.

Your IGA Journey Shouldn’t Be a Death March

Too many CISOs have PTSD from their last IGA deployment.
We want to change that.

With SecurEnds, implementation follows a three-phase maturity model:

1. Start with UAR
   Run access reviews quickly, eliminate excess access, and establish a compliance baseline.

2. Add provisioning
   Automate access changes with approval flows and real-time fulfillment via T-Hub.

3. Enforce policies
   Introduce preventive controls like SoD enforcement, identity mapping, and birthright provisioning.

This crawl-walk-run model allows teams to see value in weeks—not years—while progressively strengthening their governance posture.

And yes, we’ve done it with global banks, manufacturing firms, and SaaS unicorns.
You don’t need a fleet of consultants. You need a platform—and a partner—that actually understands your reality.

You Don’t Need More Features. You Need Outcomes.

Too many vendors are still selling shelfware.
At SecurEnds, our value proposition is simple: results, not roadmaps.

• Faster time to value

• Full coverage across human and non-human identities

• Configurable automation that fits your org

• Clear reporting for every stakeholder

You shouldn’t need a PhD in identity to run a compliant access review.
You shouldn’t wait three quarters to shut off access for terminated users.
You shouldn’t be stuck with a legacy IGA tool that costs more to operate than it saves in risk.

Why Stay Stuck?

So I’ll ask again:

Why stay stuck with legacy IGA when your business needs agility and results?
Why accept a broken process when there’s a better way forward?

At SecurEnds, we’re not just building tools—we’re empowering security teams to govern access with clarity, speed, and control.
And we’re doing it without the baggage of legacy systems or the consulting treadmill.

If you’re ready to modernize—and be the hero who finally gets identity governance right—let’s talk.

Let’s rewrite the IGA playbook. Together.