Bridging the Identity Security Talent Gap

Why SecOps Needs Tools That Work Like Teammates, Not Noobs

Walk into any security operations center (SOC) today and you’ll see the same fire being fought from different angles: the identity and access management (IAM) talent gap. It’s not just that hiring is hard; a big part of the problem is that the job has changed.

The era of straightforward role-based access control and a couple of SAML connectors is behind us. Now, it includes federated identities, identity providers stitched across multi-cloud environments, zero standing privileges, ephemeral access policies, ABAC, different CIEM dashboards, a multitude of international cybersecurity standards, and dynamic service account provisioning. Meanwhile, your SOC team still has to handle phishing attempts, endpoint alerts, staff training, and an ever-growing backlog of patching, incident response, reporting, and compliance shenanigans.

The IAM Talent Gap Problem is Structural

At the heart of the issue is complexity. Identities now span multi-cloud environments, SaaS, service accounts, CI/CD bots, contractors, AI security, and third-party integrations. No single vendor owns the whole plane anymore. The result? A complicated sprawl of overlapping tools (Okta, Entra ID, AWS IAM, Google Cloud IAM, and more), each with its own approach to policies, credentials, and entitlement lifecycles.

Finding someone deeply fluent in all of those is like finding a unicorn who speaks fluent Terraform and can also explain Entra ID governance over lunch. Good luck with that. It’s not that the talent doesn’t exist; it’s that it’s spread too thin, locked into silos, or, more often, already scooped up by Big Tech with salaries you can’t match.

So what happens? Organizations delay. IAM modernization plans get pushed down the road. Identity drift creeps in. Orphaned accounts pile up. Audit trails get murky. Entitlements sprawl. Security teams burn time rotating keys or manually reviewing privilege escalation logs. Provisioning and deprovisioning take a back seat to other priorities. Risk accumulates in the corners no one has time to sweep.

Automation Isn’t Optional Anymore

Rather than asking humans to become multi-platform IAM polymaths overnight, smart orgs are changing the model. Instead of trying to fill the identity gap with people, they’re filling it with automation and giving people the means to orchestrate that automation intelligently.

Think of it like replacing a thousand small, manual stitches with a machine loom. You don’t need to understand the micro-details of every IAM tool in your stack. You need a tool that understands them, abstracts complexity, sees the overly broad permissions, and provides clean, auditable workflows.

This is where modern access orchestration tools enter the frame. Not as another dashboard to manage, but as teammates with pre-baked knowledge of how AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud handle access. Instead of coding IAM policies from scratch, you configure what “access” should look like, and the system handles the provisioning, expiration, and revocation—automatically, and in line with your policies.

From Policy Architects to Policy Coaches

This changes the nature of the IAM skill set. The modern IAM-savvy security pro doesn’t need to know everything about every platform; they just need to know what “good” looks like: how to structure least privilege policies, when to use JIT access, how to define conditions and time bounds, and how to map compliance requirements to entitlements. Then, they let automation handle the execution.

We’re shifting from being policy architects to policy coaches. The real value lies in understanding context: who needs access, when, why, and for how long. Once that logic is embedded, the platform can handle thousands of decisions faster than any human, and enforce those decisions consistently.

That consistency doesn’t just improve security. It frees up your security team to focus on higher-impact work, such as incident response, threat modelling, and detection engineering, rather than managing ticket queues and approval flows for IAM.

SOCs Deserve Better Than Manual Access Reviews

Security analysts spend far too much time investigating things that should never have been possible in the first place. Lateral movement, data exfiltration, privilege escalation… all of which often stem from standing privileges that never got revoked or overbroad permissions that nobody questioned.

Access orchestration tools cut this off at the source. They can remove standing access, enforce time-bounded permissions, log every request and approval, and even require second-party justification or peer approval. Suddenly, the SOC isn’t playing whack-a-mole; they’re working from a cleaner, more predictable environment with fewer fire drills and less identity-induced risk.

Automation as the Bridge to Upskilling

If you’re a CISO or a security lead looking at your team, the benefits compound. Rather than hunting for an elusive “IAM wizard” with 10 years of AWS, Azure, and Okta experience, you can build a team of smart, security-minded professionals who know how to use the tools. The automation platform becomes a force multiplier, codifying knowledge, enforcing consistency, and giving junior staff a leg up while they learn.

“It’s extremely easy to use. You just log into the [Trustle] dashboard. It’s intuitive and incredibly simple. You don’t have to spend time learning a new piece of software.” 

- CEO Mark Feldman, CEO, RevenueBase

Training becomes faster. Turnover hurts less. Audit readiness becomes easier. Compliance becomes a by-product, not a sprint. IAM transitions from a specialist function to a shared responsibility, enabling more people to contribute safely.

Hiring Will Always Lag Behind Complexity

We’ll never fully hire our way out of the IAM skills gap. The field is moving faster than HR budgets. But we can design systems that close that gap by default—systems that abstract, automate, and align identity decisions to policy without constant human babysitting.

That’s what good access orchestration does. It doesn’t just automate tasks—it replaces chaos with structure. It takes the burden off your people and puts it on something that scales. And in a world where risk moves fast and talent moves faster, that might be the most strategic skill of all.

Making Change Happen Now

The identity talent gap isn’t going away. But with the right automation in place, you don’t need to wait on hypothetical unicorn hires. By embracing intelligent orchestration, you give your team the tools to scale IAM without becoming experts in every platform - and you can be sure that a tool like Trustle is much cheaper (with better ROI) than paying for unicorn talent. It’s not just a shortcut. It’s the new skill set: knowing how to coach the system, not do everything manually.

And your SOC will thank you for it.