Why Context is Essential for Strengthening Identity-First Security

Ensuring a robust identity-first security strategy isn’t just about authentication and authorization controls—it requires context.

The challenge lies in looking beyond isolated security tools and fragmented IAM policies. Without proper context, organizations risk making security decisions in a vacuum, leaving gaps that adversaries can exploit. This is where an identity-first security strategy enriched with context becomes a game-changer.

Context Requires Visibility

To gain a complete picture of your identity ecosystem, consider categorizing your applications into three buckets:

1. Known applications – These are apps that are actively managed and have identity controls in place.
2. Known unknowns – Applications you are aware of but haven't fully assessed due to time, resource constraints, or technical barriers.
3. Unknown unknowns – Apps that remain completely outside your visibility, creating the greatest security risk.

The third category represents a critical blind spot where compliance failures and security breaches can emerge. Adding context to your identity-first strategy means ensuring there are no unknown unknowns in your environment.

Also Known Applications Have Limited Visibility

While organizations focus on known and known-unknown applications, visibility gaps still persist with those. The assumption that an audit trail or user directory captures all authentication and authorization data is often incorrect. Even if you have logs, do you know where they reside and what they contain? You are only as good as your logs.

For example, if an application lacks an audit trail altogether, it's as if it never existed from a security perspective, leaving you blind to its activity. Similarly, if access logs are incomplete or inconsistent, critical security gaps can go undetected. This is why traditional IAM tools fall short—they rely on what’s already known rather than discovering and contextualizing all authentication flows.

Shifting the Mindset: Trusting the Right Source of Truth

Rather than relying on IAM tools, outdated CMDBs, or even what application owners report, a more effective approach is to start with application discovery and direct validation. Organizations need to trust what actually exists rather than assumptions based on fragmented identity data.

1. Step 1: Build a complete application inventory – Identify all applications in your environment, regardless of their source. For more information, read our blog on how to build an application inventory.
2. Step 2: Derive identity-related data from each application – Enrich or generate audit trails, even when traditional IAM sources fall short.
3. Step 3: Augment with IAM signals – Once the application-identity map is established, gather additional signals from your IAM stack.

By shifting from IAM-first to application-first, organizations ensure they are making decisions based on reality—not outdated records, user-reported data, or incomplete visibility from identity platforms.

Enriching with Identity Context from Your IAM Stack

Identity-first security isn’t just about knowing where authentication happens—it’s about understanding the conditions under which access occurs. IAM tools hold critical context, including:

• Who has access – User entitlements, group memberships, privileged accounts.
• How access is used – Login frequency, device types, session lengths.
• Conditional access – MFA requirements, location-based rules, and time-based restrictions.

For instance, an IT team may grant temporary application access from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM, with automatic expiration after three months. Only the IAM tool holds this contextual data. Without it, your security posture lacks decision-making context.

A fragmented IAM stack further complicates the picture, making manual correlation across disparate tools nearly impossible. This is why an application-first approach, coupled with automated context enrichment, is essential.

Orchid Security: Providing the Missing Lego Piece for Complete Context

Orchid Security eliminates IAM blind spots by:

• Discovering all applications — known, known-unknown, and unknown unknowns.
• Automatically mapping authentication and authorization flows.
• Creating new audit trails when none exist, or enriching current audit trails.
• Providing actionable identity insights by correlating IAM signals into the complete contextual picture .

Take the example of Employee Benefits, an application mapped by Orchid Security. If a user authenticates via Active Directory, their activity appears in AD logs. However, if another user logs in via an unmonitored web form, that flow remains invisible to traditional IAM tools.

By working backwards from applications, Orchid Security uncovers these hidden authentication paths, ensuring complete security context.

The Path Forward

Identity-first security without context is identity security with blind spots. Organizations need to move beyond IAM-centric strategies and adopt a modern identity fabric approach—one that starts with comprehensive discovery and seamlessly integrates, contextualizes, and enriches identity security at every layer of the enterprise.

With Orchid Security, organizations gain full visibility, enriched audit trails, and actionable context—all without the heavy lifting of manual integrations.

Ready to take identity-first security to the next level? Let’s talk.