Navigating Identity Governance Challenges in Global Partnership Organizations

How do you govern access when your organization stretches across borders, business units, and third-party partnerships — each with its own systems, users, and rules?

For many global organizations, this isn’t just a technical problem. It’s a business risk with real consequences. When identity governance breaks down, overprovisioned accounts, orphaned access, and inconsistent permissions can quietly undermine your security posture. In the worst cases, these gaps have been the root cause behind high-profile breaches, regulatory penalties, and damaged partner relationships.

The challenge gets even harder when your ecosystem includes vendors, contractors, joint ventures, and outsourced teams. Each of these partners may operate under different standards, with separate identity systems, varying onboarding processes, and different levels of maturity around security and compliance. Without a coordinated approach to Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), managing “who has access to what” across this complex landscape becomes unsustainable.

Identity governance is about more than granting and revoking access. It’s the foundation of trust between your business and everyone who connects to your systems, whether they’re internal employees or external collaborators. In global partnerships, getting it right means reducing risk without stifling the agility and cooperation that partnerships are intended to enable.

In this article, we will explore the identity governance challenges that global partnership organizations face, why these issues persist, and strategies to overcome them. Whether you’re already working within a complex partner ecosystem or planning to expand internationally, understanding these challenges is essential to safeguarding both your operations and your reputation.

The Complexity of Global Access Management

Identity governance always sounds simple on the surface: manage who has access to what, and make sure it’s appropriate. But once we step into global operations and partnership ecosystems, that simplicity quickly unravels.

In many partnership-driven environments, there’s no single source of truth for identity. Different business units rely on their own directories. Partners bring their own identity systems — Active Directory, Azure AD, Okta, or homegrown solutions — and they don’t always agree on how identity should be defined or managed. What qualifies as a “contractor” or a “trusted partner” in one organization might look very different in another.

This fragmentation makes it difficult to answer basic governance questions like:

When I’ve worked with global organizations, I often see access being granted based on trust, habit, or convenience instead of a well-defined process. Someone on the team knows a person at the partner company, so they get credentials emailed directly, or accounts are created manually, outside of any structured workflow. Over time, these one-off exceptions pile up. By the time someone audits permissions, the landscape is full of accounts that no one remembers approving.

Conflicting Policies — or No Policies at All

One of the biggest contributors to identity governance failure is the absence of clear, consistent policies across the partner ecosystem. But just as often, the issue isn’t a lack of policy — it’s the fact that too many policies exist, and they conflict with each other.

Here’s how that happens inside many global partnerships:

• Your central IT team might require access reviews every 90 days, while a partner organization reviews annually (if at all).
• Your security standards may enforce least-privilege access, while a regional partner grants broad administrative rights to avoid operational delays.
• One group uses role-based access controls (RBAC), while another allows direct permission assignments “just to get things done.”

These conflicts aren’t always caused by poor governance. Sometimes they’re driven by legitimate differences in local laws or industry regulations. For example:

The result is a governance patchwork. Even when well-meaning teams are doing their best to comply with the rules they know, the lack of policy alignment across borders leaves dangerous gaps in oversight.

I’ve seen cases where one partner’s internal process allows a contractor to keep their account active for six months after leaving a project — not out of negligence, but because their local labor laws or contractual terms prevent immediate deprovisioning. Meanwhile, the primary organization’s policy demands deprovisioning within 24 hours. Both sides believe they’re following the right process — but neither process truly protects the shared systems at the heart of the partnership.

The challenge here isn’t simply “enforce your policy harder.” The challenge is reconciling these conflicting policies and regulatory requirements so that governance can be applied consistently — even when legal obligations differ across regions.

Regulatory Compliance Across Jurisdictions

In global partnership environments, the complexity of identity governance isn’t just about technology or process. It’s also about navigating the legal and regulatory obligations that shape how access must be controlled, documented, and reported.

When your organization operates across multiple countries — or even if you’re collaborating with partners who do — you’re stepping into a landscape where compliance rules don’t always align. What’s required in one jurisdiction may be restricted in another. And when these requirements conflict, identity governance becomes not only a security challenge but a legal one.

When Laws Pull Your Policies in Opposite Directions

Consider how different regions approach data privacy and access control:

If your European partners require data erasure under GDPR, but your U.S. partners are legally required to retain certain records for seven years under financial regulations like SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act), which rule takes precedence?

These kinds of conflicts are not just legal puzzles — they’re governance roadblocks. They can stop you from applying consistent policies, and they often push organizations into reactive exception handling instead of proactive compliance.

Security standards like ISO/IEC 27001 and NIST SP 800-53 provide valuable frameworks, but they don’t resolve jurisdictional conflicts. That work still has to be done through internal policy reconciliation, legal review, and partner alignment.

Cross-Border Accountability: Who Owns the Risk?

When regulations conflict, the next question is accountability: who owns the risk when governance fails?

If a partner fails to remove access after a contractor’s exit and that failure leads to a data breach, does the responsibility lie with the partner? With your organization? With both?

The answer depends on the partnership model, but regulators tend to hold the data controller, not the partner, responsible. Without shared accountability, finger-pointing takes the place of action.

This is why compliance must be built into your governance model, not bolted on after the fact.

Third-Party Risk and Overextended Access

Every partnership is built on trust, but in identity governance, trust without verification becomes a liability. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way many organizations handle third-party access.

When we invite vendors, contractors, suppliers, or joint venture partners into our systems, we often do so with the best intentions: to share information, collaborate efficiently, and get work done. But without proper governance, this access can quietly grow beyond its original purpose, creating one of the most common — and most dangerous — identity risks in global partnerships: overextended access.

How Overextended Access Happens

The problem usually starts small. A vendor team gets access to a specific application for a project. Over time, the project scope changes, new people join the team, and others move on. The original permissions remain in place, but no one is quite sure who still needs what.

Then there’s the “just in case” mentality. Partner organizations request broader access than they need because it’s easier than asking for new permissions every time the situation changes. Internal stakeholders approve those requests because they don’t want to be the bottleneck. Little by little, least-privilege access becomes wide-open access.

I’ve seen partner users who were granted administrative rights simply because no one wanted to delay a deployment. Those permissions, meant to be temporary, quietly became permanent. Months later, no one remembered who approved them—or why.

Multiply that across dozens of partners and hundreds of accounts, and the risk compounds quickly.

The Breach Path No One Sees Coming

This isn’t just a theoretical problem. Third-party access has played a key role in some of the most damaging breaches in recent years.

The 2020 SolarWinds attack, for example, exploited software supply chain vulnerabilities that allowed attackers to move laterally across networks through trusted channels. While that breach was primarily about software updates, it served as a wake-up call for many organizations: the weakest link in your security may not be inside your own walls.

Similarly, the Target breach of 2013 started with network credentials stolen from a third-party HVAC vendor. Those credentials allowed attackers to access Target’s network and ultimately exfiltrate data from millions of customers.

In both cases, the problem wasn’t that these companies lacked security policies. It was that the access granted to third parties wasn’t properly governed, reviewed, or limited.

The Challenge of Offboarding External Identities

One of the hardest questions in third-party identity governance is also the most basic: How do you know when it’s time to remove access?

Internal employees typically have HR-driven processes that trigger access changes when someone leaves the company or changes roles. But for partners and contractors, these signals are often missing. Your organization may have no visibility into the partner’s internal staffing changes. Unless someone manually flags the change, external accounts can remain active long after the associated user has moved on.

Without clear accountability and regular, enforced access reviews, third-party access can drift out of control. The longer this goes unchecked, the harder it becomes to untangle.

Periodic Access Reviews: Necessary but Often Neglected

Access reviews are supposed to catch these issues. However, in many organizations, reviews are treated as compliance exercises rather than genuine security controls. Stakeholders might rubber-stamp approvals because they don’t have the time (or the insight) to verify whether access is still appropriate. Or worse, no reviews happen at all for external accounts because ownership of those reviews is unclear.

This is where identity governance must go beyond policy documents and checklists. Governance has to be operationalized — with tools and processes that make access review and certification part of the system, not an afterthought.

Inconsistent Identity Lifecycle Processes

If identity governance is about managing who has access to what, the foundation of that process is the identity lifecycle — onboarding, changes in role or responsibility, and offboarding. However, in global partnership environments, these lifecycle events are often handled inconsistently, if at all.

Inside a single organization, identity lifecycle management is usually tied to HR systems. When an employee joins, changes roles, or leaves, that event triggers automated processes to create, modify, or remove access. But when we extend these processes across partners, contractors, or external collaborators, that structure tends to fall apart.

The Joiner, Mover, Leaver Problem — Without a Signal

The concept of Joiner, Mover, Leaver (JML) is core to effective identity lifecycle management:

The challenge in partnership environments is that you may not receive these signals at all, or they may come late, incomplete, or from someone who isn’t authorized to make the request. Your partner’s HR system doesn’t talk to your access management platform. In some cases, the partner may not even know which systems their people have access to on your side.

I’ve seen this happen repeatedly in project-based relationships. Contractors are onboarded for a specific phase of work, but when the project ends, no one formally closes out their accounts. Months later, those credentials still work — and in some cases, they’ve been repurposed for new hires at the partner organization without any notification.

This isn’t just a process gap. It’s a governance failure that creates real risk.

Role Creep and Privilege Accumulation

Even when offboarding happens correctly, many organizations struggle with the middle stage of the lifecycle: movers. People change projects. Contractors shift between roles. Partners expand their scope of work. But access permissions rarely get adjusted downward. Instead, new permissions get added on top of the old ones — a slow, silent creep toward excessive access.

This problem is especially common when there’s no clear role definition across partner relationships. One partner may treat a database administrator as a privileged role with strict controls. Another may see it as a general-purpose IT role with broad rights. Without agreed-upon role definitions and governance, these mismatches lead to inconsistent entitlements across the ecosystem.

The result? People accumulate access they no longer need — and sometimes shouldn’t have had in the first place.

Shadow IT and Unmanaged Access Paths

The lifecycle problem doesn’t stop at official systems. In many global partnerships, teams collaborate using shared folders, SaaS tools, and cloud services that exist outside formal IT governance. These Shadow IT environments often operate without proper lifecycle controls:

Because these tools aren’t integrated with your central identity systems, access management becomes manual — if it happens at all. And manual processes, especially in fast-paced project environments, are often the first to be skipped.

The Accountability Gap

All of these lifecycle challenges boil down to one key question: Who is responsible for managing external identities?

In many partnership models, that question doesn’t have a clear answer. Internal IT may assume that the partner is handling access changes. The partner assumes that the hiring manager or project lead will notify the IT department. And somewhere between those assumptions, governance fails.

Successful identity governance requires that ownership is clearly defined — and that lifecycle processes are enforceable, not optional. Without that foundation, even the best governance policies will fail when put into practice.

Technology Fragmentation and Integration Gaps

Even when organizations have strong policies and clear lifecycle processes on paper, technology fragmentation often undermines their ability to enforce identity governance in practice. In global partnership environments, where different business units and partners operate with their own systems and standards, this problem becomes even more pronounced.

Simply put, the tools don’t always talk to each other, and when they do, they don’t always speak the same language.

Disparate Identity Platforms Across the Ecosystem

One of the most common challenges I see is the patchwork of identity systems across partner networks:

In isolation, each of these systems might work fine for the group that owns it. But across the partnership ecosystem, this fragmentation makes it nearly impossible to get a unified view of identity. Without a common governance layer, there’s no reliable way to enforce consistent access policies, conduct access reviews, or automate deprovisioning across systems.

I’ve worked with teams who had to manually reconcile user lists between their IAM platform and a partner’s project management tool, just to figure out who still had access. That kind of manual work doesn’t scale. And worse, it creates windows where inappropriate access can persist simply because the system of record has no visibility into the external identity source.

SaaS and Cloud Applications Outside Central Control

The rise of SaaS applications and cloud services has made these problems even harder to manage. Many cloud-based tools have their own native identity and access controls, but may not integrate cleanly with your IAM or governance solutions.

For example:

The answer, too often, is “no.” In many cases, governance stops at the system boundary where integration ends.

The Pitfalls of Manual Integration

Some organizations try to solve this fragmentation with manual integration efforts. They build connectors, custom scripts, or APIs between systems. While these stopgaps may work in the short term, they tend to introduce more complexity and maintenance overhead over time.

Custom-built connectors often break when:

Manual integrations also lack the flexibility to adapt to new partners or changing requirements. Every new relationship requires either another connector or a new exception process, and neither approach promotes scalable governance.

Visibility Without Control

Even when systems share data, that doesn’t always mean governance is working. Visibility into account lists or login activity is helpful, but it’s not the same as control. Without the ability to enforce policy decisions (such as access revocation, role reassignment, or policy-based provisioning), integration becomes little more than monitoring.

True governance requires that your identity platform can do more than observe. It needs to act automatically, consistently, and according to policy.

Strategies to Overcome Identity Governance Challenges

The challenges of identity governance in global partnership environments are complex, but they aren’t unsolvable. Managing who has access to what, across a diverse landscape of partners, regions, and systems, requires more than just written policies. It takes process, technology, and accountability working together.

Over the years, I’ve seen organizations struggle with these issues because they try to tackle governance in isolation, focusing on tools without aligning policies, or defining rules without the operational support to enforce them. The organizations that succeed take a holistic approach.

Here’s where to start.

Centralize Oversight, Even If You Can’t Centralize Identity

In global ecosystems, you may never fully unify all identity sources. But you can centralize how those identities are governed.

That’s where dedicated Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platforms like SailPoint and ForgeRock add value. These tools provide the connectors and workflows needed to integrate disparate identity systems, normalize user data, and apply governance consistently across platforms. They allow you to:

The goal isn’t to force everyone into a single directory. The goal is to create a unified governance framework that spans your internal teams and external partnerships.

Establish Shared Governance Agreements With Partners

Technology alone won’t align policies across your partner ecosystem. You need formal agreements that define how identity governance will operate between organizations.

This includes:

In my experience, many breaches tied to third-party access weren’t the result of bad intent — they were the result of undefined expectations. When everyone assumes someone else is handling governance, no one is.

Make governance expectations explicit. Build them into contracts and partnership agreements, not as optional best practices but as enforceable requirements.

Automate Wherever Possible — But Don’t Outsource Accountability

Manual processes are where governance breakdowns most often occur. They depend on people remembering to follow steps, notify the right teams, and keep spreadsheets up to date.

Wherever possible, replace manual onboarding, access changes, and offboarding with automated workflows triggered by events (like HR status changes, project milestones, or contract expirations). Use policy-based automation to:

But automation doesn’t mean abdication. Every automated process should have a clearly defined process owner who remains accountable for governance outcomes.

Make Access Reviews Meaningful — Not Just a Compliance Checkbox

Access reviews often fail because they’re treated as box-checking exercises. Managers rubber-stamp approvals without understanding what they’re signing off on, or because the review process dumps an overwhelming list of permissions in their lap with no context.

Successful reviews require:

Governance tools like SailPoint and ForgeRock support these review workflows, providing the visibility and context reviewers need to make informed decisions.

Build Continuous Monitoring Into Your Governance Model

Governance isn’t a one-time event. Regulations evolve, projects change, people come and go. If your governance processes rely on annual reviews and static policies, they will fall out of alignment before your next audit.

Instead, build continuous monitoring into your governance program:

Continuous monitoring turns governance from a passive process into an active control, one that adapts as your environment changes.

Governance Is a Partnership Responsibility

Finally, remember that identity governance in global partnerships is a shared responsibility. No tool or policy will succeed if it operates in a vacuum.

The most effective governance programs I’ve seen are the ones where:

Good governance isn’t about locking down access so tightly that collaboration becomes impossible. It’s about creating enough structure that trust is supported by control, not replaced by it.

Conclusion: Governance as a Business Enabler

When we talk about identity governance, especially in the context of global partnerships, it’s easy to frame the conversation around risk and compliance. And while those concerns are absolutely valid, focusing on risk alone misses the bigger opportunity.

At its core, good identity governance isn’t just about locking down systems or satisfying auditors. It’s about enabling your organization — and your partners — to work together securely, efficiently, and with confidence.

When everyone in your ecosystem knows who has access to what, and why, you create an environment where collaboration doesn’t have to come at the expense of control. You reduce friction in onboarding. You simplify offboarding. You empower project teams to move quickly — without leaving governance behind as an afterthought.

But achieving that balance takes more than good intentions. It requires:

The challenges we’ve covered here — policy conflicts, fragmented systems, overextended access, inconsistent lifecycle management — are not unique to any one organization. They are systemic issues in modern partnership-driven business models. But they’re also solvable with the right mix of process, technology, and leadership.

When identity governance is done well, it doesn’t just prevent problems; it also enables seamless access. It strengthens trust. It improves operational efficiency. And it gives you the agility to scale partnerships and pursue new opportunities without losing control.

If you haven’t assessed your governance model across your partner relationships lately, now is the time. Because the cost of reactive governance — cleaning up after a failure — will always be higher than the investment in getting it right from the start.