Over the past two decades, organizations have steadily expanded their identity security portfolios, layering IAM, IGA, and PAM to deploy access control at scale. However, identity-driven breaches continue to grow in both frequency and impact despite this sustained investment.

It has been argued that the failure of this system is not the result of weak policy design or inadequate standards, but rather of the widening gap between how the identity system is governed on paper and how access actually works in reality. 

Currently, enterprise environments contain a large number of unmanaged identity artifacts, including local system accounts, legacy authentication mechanisms, orphaned service principals, embedded API keys, and application-specific entitlements, that are inaccessible to centralized controls or cannot be accessed. 

These factors constitute Identity Dark Matter, an attack surface that adversaries increasingly exploit to bypass SSO, sidestep MFA, move laterally across systems, and escalate privileges without triggering conventional identity alerts. As a result of this work, Identity Dark Matter is not merely viewed as a risk category, but as a structural defect in existing identity architectures as a whole.

The new identity control plane proposes a method of reconciling intended access policies with effective, real-world authorization by correlating runtime telemetry with contextual identity signals and automating remediation across managed and unmanaged identities. 

Amidst this shift toward identity-centered security models, Orchid Security has been formally recognized as a Cool Vendor by Gartner in its 2025 report on Cool Vendors in Identity-First Security, highlighting its growing significance in redefining enterprise identity infrastructure.

Orchid has been recognized as one of a select group of vendors that address real-time security exposure and threat mitigation in increasingly perimeterless environments while maintaining compatibility with existing IAM infrastructures. As cloud adoption and API-driven architectures increase, network-bound security models become obsolete, elevating identity as the primary control plane for modern security architectures, according to Gartner's analysis.

Orchid is positioned as an innovative identity infrastructure provider by utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning analytics to continuously correlate identity data, identify coverage gaps that are often overlooked during traditional IAM deployments and onboardings, and provide comprehensive observability across the application ecosystems. 

Moreover, Gartner reports that Orchid's emphasis on orchestration and fabric-level visibility enables enterprises to enhance their security posture while simultaneously supporting automated operations, positioning the platform as a unique solution capable of ensuring identity risk compliance across diverse and evolving enterprise environments with precision, scalability, and compliance. 

The traditional identity platforms are mainly designed around static configuration data and predefined policy models, which allows them to be implemented in a very limited number of domains, however their effectiveness is usually limited to well-governed, human-centric identities. 

When applied to the realities of modern enterprise environments, where custom applications are being developed, legacy authentication mechanisms are being used, credentials are embedded, non-human identity is still prevalent, and access paths do not bypass centralized identity providers, these approaches fall short. In consequence, security teams are often forced to conduct reactive analysis, reconstructing identity behavior retrospectively during audits or investigations conducted as a result of these incidents. 

It is inherently unsustainable at scale, as it relies on inference instead of continuous visibility into the utilization of identities within applications and services. To address this structural gap, Orchid Security has developed an identity observability model that aligns with the real-world security operations environment. A four-stage platform consists of four stages: discovery, analysis, orchestration, and auditing. 

The platform begins by identifying how identities are used inside applications in a direct manner, followed by an audit. With Orchid's lightweight instrumentation, we examine both managed and unmanaged environments at a high level in regards to authentication methods, authorization logic and credential handling. The goal of this process is to produce a comprehensive, runtime-driven inventory of applications, services, identity types, authentication flows, and embedded credentials that enables us to create an accurate baseline of identity activity. 

By correlating identities, applications, and access paths, Orchid analyzes identity behavior in context, identifying material risk indicators such as shared or hardcoded credentials, orphaned service accounts, privileged access outside the realm of Identity and Access Controls, as well as drift between desired policy and effective access. 

Identity-centric defense has evolved in alignment with Gartner's assessment that the accelerated adoption of digital transformation, cloud computing, remote work, API-driven architectures, and API-driven architectures have fundamentally undermined perimeter-based security, requiring the adoption of identity-first security as an integral part of enterprise protection.

With the advent of artificial intelligence and large language models within this emerging paradigm for identity and access management, a more dynamic and context-aware approach is now possible, capable of identifying systemic blind spots, latent exposure, and misconfigurations that are normally missed by static, rule-based systems. This technology enables stronger security outcomes while reducing operational friction through automation by continuously analyzing identity flows and enforcing policy according to real-time context. 

The orchestration-centric identity infrastructure offered by Orchid Security reflects this shift by extending beyond traditional IAM limitations associated with manual application onboarding and partial visibility of managed systems that have already been deployed. 

By enabling continuous evaluation of identity behavior, contextual gap analysis, and risk-based remediation enforced through automated orchestration, the platform provides a more comprehensive approach to identity governance than static roles and fragmented insights. In addition to providing consistent governance across distributed environments, Orchid aligns identity operations with business objectives as well as security objectives by embedding observability and intelligence directly into the identity fabric. 

Through continuous discovery, analysis and evaluation of enterprise applications at runtime, the platform supports evidence-driven prioritization by analyzing authentication and authorization paths and comparing them to regulatory requirements and established cybersecurity frameworks. 

In addition to augmenting native controls, the remediation process is simplified by integrating with existing Identity and Access Management systems, often without requiring custom development. It is through this approach that Orchid assists organizations in addressing the increasing presence of unmanaged identity exposure, commonly known as identity dark matter. 

In addition to reducing systemic risk, improving compliance posture, and reducing operational overhead, Orchid has already deployed its platform across Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises, supporting Orchid's role in operationalizing identity-first security. It has been proven that adopting Orchid's platform yields measurable improvements in governance and accountability, in addition to incremental security improvements. 

By providing a detailed understanding of application-level identity usage, the platform reduces exposure caused by unmanaged access paths and helps security teams prepare for audits in a more timely and confident manner. The identification risk is no longer inferred or distributed between fragmented tools, but rather clearly attributed and supported by verifiable, runtime-derived evidence. 

In complex enterprise environments, it is imperative for organizations to shift from assumption-driven decision-making to evidence-based control, reinforcing the core objective of identity-first security. Increasingly, identity is fragmenting beyond traditional control points and centralized directories, making continuous, application-aware governance increasingly important. 

Providing persistent identity observability across modern application ecosystems, Orchid Security addresses this challenge by enabling organizations to discover identity usage, assess risk in context, coordinate remediation, and maintain audit-ready evidence through continuous, application-aware governance. 

There is no doubt that the operating model reflects the actual ways in which contemporary enterprise environments function, where access is dynamic, distributed, and deeply embedded within the logic of the applications. As a result of his leadership's experience in both advanced AI research and large-scale security engineering, the company has designed its identity infrastructure using practical knowledge from companies like Google DeepMind and Square, who are now part of Block. 

The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence throughout enterprise and adversarial domains has also raised the stakes for identity security, as threat actors increasingly automate reconnaissance, exploitation, and lateral movements. An Identity Control Plane, Orchid offers its platform as a means to converge managed and unmanaged identities into an authoritative view derived directly from application developers. 

The benefits of this approach include not only strengthening enterprise security postures, but also creating new opportunities for global systems integrators and managed service providers. As a result, they are able to provide additional value-added services such as continuous application security assessment, identity governance, audit readiness, incident response, and identity risk management. 

Using Orchid, organizations can accelerate the onboarding of applications, prioritize remediation according to observed risk, and monitor compliance continuously, thereby enabling the development of a new level of identity governance that minimizes organizational risk, lowers operating costs, and allows for consistent control of both human and machine identities in increasingly AI-driven organizations.