Identity management pain points hit hardest when they cut access at the wrong moment. Most teams feel them in three core areas: authentication, authorization, and lifecycle management. Each is easy to describe but difficult to perfect.
Authentication pain points start with fragmented systems. Password policies differ. Multi-factor setups break for certain devices. Developers juggle local logins, SSO, and federated identity while also keeping legacy code alive. Every integration layer is another point of failure.
Authorization pain points stem from role complexity. An engineer updates permissions in one service, but the change never propagates to another. Business rules turn into tangled ACLs, unreadable configs, and stale tokens. Access audits fail because no one trusts the data.