Identity has become one of the most fragile and business-critical systems in the enterprise.
Every user, every application, and every workload depends on identity to function. Attackers continue to use malware and target data, but identity has become both a primary pathway and a direct target for disrupting organizations. Attackers log in, escalate privileges, move laterally and break access.
And when identity fails, everything downstream fails with it.
The problem is, for most organizations identity no longer lives in a single system. Identity now exists as an interconnected fabric that spans multiple IdPs like Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta and a growing number of cloud and SaaS services.
This fabric does not exist by design. It formed gradually out of necessity, through cloud adoption, SaaS expansion, mergers and acquisitions, remote work, decentralized IT, and identity modernization layered on top of legacy infrastructure. Each layer was a step that was logical in isolation. But together, they create a far more complex reality.
The uncomfortable truth is that identity resilience is no longer about protecting individual configurations. It is about understanding how identity systems relate to one another and being able to restore those relationships safely. Organizations that continue to treat identity layers independently will keep experiencing cascading outages, prolonged recovery, and avoidable business disruption.
Identity today is multi-layered, intertwined, and interdependent
While Active Directory, Entra ID, and Okta are key parts of identity management, their roles are not fixed. In many organizations, AD remains the source of truth with Okta acting as the SSO front-end. In other architectures, the hierarchy is flipped to favor cloud-native flows.
Regardless of the configuration, these systems are deeply interdependent, sharing users, groups, synchronization pipelines, and trust relationships. This interconnectedness means a change in one environment rarely stays contained:
Permissions: A user authenticating through Okta may still rely on group memberships defined in Active Directory.
Policy Ripples: A role change in Entra ID can inadvertently trigger shifts in on-premises policies.
Security Risk: A compromised AD account provides a foothold to pivot into cloud applications managed elsewhere.
As a result, identity tends to mimic a web more than an IT stack—pull one thread and tension spreads. Yet most organizations still secure and recover identity systems as if they were isolated. This is where many identity security and recovery strategies stumble or fail. Active Directory has its tools. Entra ID has critical objects that are often overlooked. And Okta may or may not be backed up at all. Different teams own different layers, and different processes govern response and recovery.
That model may have worked when identity lived in a single, centralized directory. But today, 75% of organizations manage multiple identity providers, according to the Cloud Security Alliance Multi-Cloud Report 2024. Treating identity systems independently no longer reflects how identity actually operates.
When something goes wrong—whether from misconfiguration, sync drift, insider activity, or an active attack—teams are forced to answer questions their tools were never designed to handle:
Where did the problem start?
What actually changed? What are the effects of this change?
Did those changes propagate into other identity systems?
Were changes legitimate, accidental or malicious?
And most importantly, how do we recover without breaking access somewhere else?
Rolling back objects in one directory can sever relationships in another. Restoring one system without accounting for its dependencies can create orphaned identities, broken federation, or corrupted state. In many cases, recovery efforts can extend the outage instead of resolving it.
This is why identity incidents are so disruptive. Not simply because attackers gain access, but because organizations lack a safe way to untangle the identity fabric once trust is broken.
Attackers understand this dynamic. They deliberately exploit the seams between identity systems, where visibility drops and coordination breaks down. The more interconnected the fabric, the more complex identity recovery becomes when something goes wrong.
Identity can no longer be treated as a collection of siloed systems.
It is a fabric. And resilience now depends on protecting and restoring the fabric as a whole.
👉 Learn more at www.rubrik.com/identity