Nobody plans it. Everybody inherits it.

No organization sets out to lose control of access. It happens anyway.

A new project spins up. A contractor joins. A pipeline needs permission now. A SaaS app gets integrated. An AI agent starts doing whatever it is AI agents do. An incident requires emergency access. All sensible, all justified, all urgent.

Months later, nobody quite remembers who still has access, why they have it, or whether they still need it. That creeping loss of control is access sprawl, and in many modern cloud environments, it’s becoming the default state.

What Access Sprawl Really Is

Access sprawl isn’t one bad decision. It’s the cumulative effect of thousands of small, reasonable ones born of expediency, delivery pressure, and the (arguably) perfectly human desire to keep things moving rather than stop and tidy up access that “still works.”

It shows up as:

• Engineers holding permissions from old projects.
• Service accounts with privileges far beyond their current workload.
• OAuth grants that survived app migrations.
• “Temporary” admin access that never expired.
• CI/CD pipelines over-scoped to avoid breaking releases.

Nothing here looks reckless in isolation. Together, they create an access layer so large and tangled that no one can confidently answer a simple question: who can do what, right now?

Microsoft’s State of Multicloud Security report quantified the scale of this problem. Across customer environments, Microsoft observed 209 million identities and over 51,000 permissions. Only 2% of those permissions were used, and 50% were deemed high risk.

That’s not a tooling gap. That’s access sprawl at scale.

Why Does Access Sprawl Become Dangerous

Access sprawl doesn’t just sit there. It changes how incidents unfold.

The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report shows that around 88% of basic web application breaches involved stolen credentials.

Once an attacker compromises an identity, excess permissions determine the blast radius. Over-privileged access turns an initial foothold into lateral movement, persistence, and data exposure. All without triggering obvious alarms, because the access is technically valid.

The 2025 Thales Global Cloud Security Study reinforces this trend, reporting that 68% of organizations experienced access-based attacks, directly linking cloud incidents to identity and permission weaknesses.

Access sprawl doesn’t cause breaches on its own. It decides how bad they get.

Tokens, Sessions, and the Illusion of Safety

Many organizations take comfort in strong authentication. MFA is enforced. Password policies are tight. Identity feels “done”.

Attackers have moved on.

Microsoft’s Digital Defense reporting highlights a sharp rise in adversary-in-the-middle phishing and token theft, where attackers bypass MFA entirely by stealing session tokens.

When access sprawl exists, stolen tokens are devastating. They inherit every excess permission attached to that identity. No brute force required. No suspicious login alerts. Just legitimate access doing illegitimate things.

Real-World Incidents Follow the Same Pattern

The Snowflake customer breaches of 2024–2025 are a clear example. A Snowflake platform vulnerability did not cause these incidents. Investigations showed attackers using compromised customer credentials, often harvested months earlier via infostealers.

The problem wasn’t just credential theft. It was what those credentials could still access long after their original purpose had passed.

Research into OAuth and SaaS integration risks shows a similar theme. Poorly governed identity trust relationships can allow attackers to bypass expected controls entirely.

Access sprawl hides in places most security teams don’t routinely inspect: integrations, tokens, and inherited trust through the likes of mergers and acquisitions.

Why Access Sprawl Keeps Accelerating

Three structural forces make access sprawl hard to avoid:

1. Non-human identities now vastly outnumber people, yet are rarely reviewed with the same discipline.
2. Multi-cloud and SaaS environments fragment visibility across platforms and teams.
3. Delivery pressure rewards speed and resilience, not revocation and cleanup.

This isn’t failure. It’s gravity.

Without systems designed to counter it actively, access sprawl grows faster than manual governance can keep up.

Containing Access Sprawl Without Becoming the Department of “No”

The solution isn’t heavier approval boards or larger static roles. Those approaches slow teams down while leaving the underlying sprawl intact.

What works looks more pragmatic:

• Continuous visibility into entitlements, not annual or quarterly snapshots.
• Just-in-time access that expires automatically for humans and machines.
• Fine-grained, task-scoped permissions, instead of broad standing roles.
• Automated approval and revocation, embedded in existing workflows.
• Unified governance across cloud and SaaS, rather than per-platform silos.

Access should behave like cloud infrastructure: dynamic, observable, and reversible.

The Quiet Risk You Can Still Get Ahead Of

Access sprawl rarely triggers alarms. It grows through good intentions and sensible trade-offs. But when incidents occur, it determines whether you can contain them quickly or spend weeks untangling who did what.

Organizations that actively manage access sprawl don’t just reduce risk. They regain confidence in their cloud environments, move faster without fear, and stop discovering legacy access paths during audits or incidents.

Access sprawl is not inevitable.

Ignoring it is.