“Imagine a company moving 50 applications from on-premises to the cloud or between cloud vendors. With the average enterprise using 1,295 cloud apps, the complexity is staggering. Without an adaptable identity access management system, organizations must rewrite apps, reset passwords, and navigate conflicting IAM protocols—significantly increasing cost and security risks.” – Eric Olden, CEO and Co-founder at Strata Identity

Your identity and access management system (IAM) is essential to securely and efficiently control user identities across on-premises and cloud environments. The challenge increases significantly when organizations are using more than one cloud. Without a unified approach, businesses risk security gaps, operational inefficiencies, and vendor lock-in. 

This article explores how organizations can optimize IAM systems for multi-cloud environments, ensuring integration, security, and compliance.

Challenges of identity access management systems in multi-cloud environments

Each cloud identity access management system implements its own operating model, leading to multiple user identities across platforms. This fragmented approach creates operational bottlenecks, making it difficult to unify identity policies, enforce access controls, and ensure smooth authentication.

According to the State of Multi-Cloud Identity Survey 2025, 75% of organizations now manage two or more identity providers (IDPs), and 11% rely on five or more. While this approach enhances flexibility, it introduces complexity in managing access controls across disparate systems, a challenge cited by 65% of respondents. Additionally, 49% of organizations struggle with inconsistent security policies and 43% report difficulties due to lack of interoperability between identity systems.

Identity orchestration: a next-gen approach to IAM

To address these challenges, businesses are turning to identity orchestration, a modern strategy that enables streamlined identity management across multi-cloud environments. Unlike traditional IAM solutions, identity orchestration acts as a bridge, integrating legacy and modern identity and access management systems while maintaining security and consistency across platforms.

Benefits of identity orchestration for multi-cloud IAM

Identity orchestration offers a range of advantages for businesses managing multiple cloud environments.

• Unified identity management: Centralizes user identities across multiple clouds, eliminating silos and ensuring a single access profile per user.
• Improved security: Enforces consistent access policies across all cloud environments, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.
• Elimination of vendor lock-in: Supports multiple identity providers, allowing businesses to switch cloud vendors without disrupting identity management.
• Enhanced user experience: Provides frictionless access to on-premises and cloud-based applications, improving productivity and reducing login fatigue.

With these benefits, organizations can operate more securely and efficiently while maintaining compliance across cloud environments.

5 common mistakes to avoid in multi-cloud deployments

When implementing an identity access management system in a multi-cloud environment, businesses should watch out for these common mistakes:

1. Retrofitting a legacy identity and access management system
   Traditional identity and access management systems weren’t designed to integrate with modern cloud environments, making centralized identity management nearly impossible to attain. Organizations should opt for solutions that support multi-cloud integration from the start.
2. Using proprietary IAM solutions
   Avoid vendor-specific IAM technologies that lack interoperability with other identity and access management systems. Proprietary solutions can create operational bottlenecks and prevent centralized policy enforcement.
3. Failing to unify access policies
   An effective IAM strategy requires an identity abstraction layer that normalizes access policies across all cloud environments. Without this, businesses risk inconsistencies in security and user experience.
4. Relying on on-prem-only or cloud-only solutions
   IAM systems must support both cloud and hybrid environments to ensure scalability and security. A flexible solution ensures seamless identity management regardless of infrastructure changes.
5. Ignoring DevOps integration
   The IAM framework should align with cloud-native DevOps workflows, automating identity governance within the development lifecycle. Neglecting this can lead to security vulnerabilities and inefficiencies.

Addressing these things, which often cause headaches and additional costs, can help businesses ensure a more robust and scalable identity access management system for their cloud environments.

Future-proofing IAM in multi-cloud environments

As organizations expand their cloud ecosystems, implementing a scalable identity access management system is crucial to ensuring security, compliance, and operational efficiency. Identity orchestration offers a forward-thinking approach that integrates with diverse cloud platforms, preventing identity fragmentation and reducing security risks.

By leveraging identity orchestration, businesses can streamline user authentication, maintain policy consistency, and enhance cloud agility—all while minimizing IT overhead and complexity.

Want to learn more? Explore best practices for identity access management systems and multi-cloud identity orchestration in our latest guide: The State of Multi-Cloud Identity Report 2025.