Your Series A just closed. You’ve hired 15 people in six weeks. Your engineer who left last month still has AWS access. Your CTO doesn’t know who can see customer payment data. Sound familiar?
Picture this scenario at a fast-growing London fintech start-up.
Monday morning – The operations lead gets a Slack message. “Can’t access GitHub.” New developer. Started today. Nobody created her accounts. She spends her first day reading documentation.
Tuesday afternoon – AWS bill arrives. $3,200 higher than expected. Why? Three contractors who finished two months ago still run development instances. Nobody revoked their access.
Wednesday – Investor due diligence call. “Walk us through your access management.” Silence. The CTO realizes they can’t actually demonstrate who has access to customer data across 47 different SaaS platforms.
Thursday – Enterprise prospect asks for SOC 2 evidence. Sales needs to show proper access controls. They can’t. Deal stalls.
Friday – Former employee logs into Slack. Still active after three months. Sees confidential pivot strategy. Not malicious. Just forgotten.
The chaos compounds with every new hire. The security risks multiply with every former employee who retains access. And the data proves the scale of the problem.
43% of UK businesses experienced cyber security breaches or attacks in the past 12 months according to the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025. But here’s what most founders don’t realize. The breach isn’t the biggest risk. It’s the invisible chaos underneath. The orphaned accounts – abandoned user credentials from former employees that still have active system access. The shadow IT – applications and services used within organizations without explicit IT department approval. The manual provisioning that can’t keep pace with hiring velocity.
One in five organizations reported a breach due to shadow AI according to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report. When these breaches happen, they cost organizations an average of $670,000 more than standard incidents – $4.63 million versus $3.96 million. If enterprise SaaS and AI tools operate without IT oversight your team is probably using tools you don’t even know about.
When Series B investors conduct technical due diligence, they’re specifically looking for identity and access management architecture. Because 93% of organizations experienced two or more identity-related security breaches in the past year according to CyberArk’s 2024 Identity Security Threat Landscape Report. Compromised credentials. Phished passwords. Orphaned accounts from former employees.
The start-ups that scale successfully aren’t only the ones with the most developers. They’re also the ones with proper access architecture.
The Real Cost of Manual Access Management
The operational impact hits immediately.
Your average early-stage company uses 30-50 SaaS applications by Series A. Post-Series B? That climbs to 80+. Every new hire needs accounts across 15-20 platforms:
- GitHub
- AWS
- Slack
- Your CRM
- Project management tools
- Analytics platforms
- Documentation systems
- Monitoring tools
- Deployment pipelines
Manual provisioning at scale? Your operations person spends 2-3 hours per new hire just creating accounts. At three hires per week, that’s a full working day gone. Every week. Forever.
But time isn’t the real cost. These identity and access failures block funding and create compliance violations that cost far more than proper access management.
Orphaned accounts represent pure financial waste. Say 10 former employees still have licenses across 30 applications. Average cost £15 per user per month per tool. That’s £4,500 monthly. £54,000 annually wasted on access for people who don’t work for you anymore.
The security risk exceeds the financial cost. A quarter of organizations are aware that former employees can still access corporate applications, with 32% saying it takes over seven days to fully de-provision a former employee according to research from OneLogin and Beyond Identity. Threat actors specifically target orphaned accounts as they provide legitimate credentials that bypass perimeter security without active oversight. Nobody monitors login patterns for users who left three months ago.
When IBM analyzed data breaches in 2025, organizations with high levels of unmanaged access faced significantly higher breach costs. Incident response expenses multiply. Regulatory penalties hit when investigators discover former employees retained data access months after termination.
Five Architectural Controls That Solve This
Stop thinking about identity as an IT problem. It’s an architecture problem. Five interconnected controls eliminate access chaos while enabling rapid scaling.
1. Single Sign-On: One Account to Rule Them All
SSO routes all authentication through one identity provider: Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, or Google Workspace. Your team logs in once. Access flows to approved applications automatically.
Why this matters: When someone leaves, you disable one account. They immediately lose access to GitHub, AWS, Slack, your CRM, and every integrated application. Not 47 separate manual revocations. One.
Your SaaS vendors never see passwords. Authentication policies apply uniformly:
- Password complexity requirements
- MFA enforcement
- Session timeout rules
You get unified access logs. Every authentication attempt across your entire SaaS ecosystem. Complete audit trail showing who accessed what and when. This is the evidence enterprise procurement teams and investors actually want to see.
2. Role-Based Access Control: Stop Managing Individual Permissions
RBAC assigns permissions by organizational role, not by individual. You define roles once:
- Software engineer
- Senior engineer
- Sales representative
- Operations manager
- Finance analyst
Each role carries predefined permissions across your tool stack. Software engineers get GitHub, AWS development environments, and monitoring access. They don’t get production deployment permissions, customer payment data, or financial system visibility.
Your 50th engineer inherits the same appropriate access as your 10th. Automatically. No manual configuration. No decisions about which AWS policies to attach or which GitHub teams to join.
This is how you implement least privilege at scale. People receive exactly the access their role requires. Nothing more. RBAC creates a clear, auditable log of access essential for meeting regulatory requirements like GDPR, ISO 27001 and SOC 2.
3. Automated Provisioning: Access on Day One
Integration between your HR system and identity provider triggers account creation. HR adds a new software engineer starting November 25th. On November 25th at 8:00 AM, your identity provider:
- Creates their account
- Assigns the software engineer role
- Provisions access to GitHub, Slack, AWS dev environments, and documentation
The engineer receives a welcome email with login instructions. By their first standup at 9:30 AM, they have working credentials. They’re shipping code, not waiting for IT to catch up.
Provisioning 50 people manually takes hours per person. Automated provisioning takes zero marginal time. That’s the operational leverage you need when trying to double revenue without doubling headcount.
4. Multi-Factor Authentication: The 99.9% Solution
Accounts with MFA almost never get compromised. Accounts without MFA get breached constantly.
MFA requires two independent factors:
- Something you know (password)
- Something you have (authenticator app, hardware key, or biometric)
Even if someone falls for a phishing campaign and enters their password, the attacker can’t generate the time-based code from their authenticator app. Authentication fails. Your systems remain protected.
Identity-driven attacks through compromised credentials dominate the threat landscape. Phishing targets your team with fake Microsoft 365 or Slack login pages. If passwords alone protect your accounts, attackers gaining credentials immediately access your entire environment.
For UK start-ups, MFA addresses both security and compliance requirements:
- Cyber Essentials certification requires MFA on all accounts with remote access
- Enterprise customers expect organization-wide MFA before signing contracts
- Investors view mandatory MFA as baseline security during due diligence
This isn’t optional infrastructure. It’s the minimum acceptable security baseline.
5. Automated Deprovisioning: Close the Security Window
When HR marks someone as terminated, your identity provider must immediately disable their account and revoke access across all integrated applications, typically within 5-15 minutes.
No manual checklist. No coordination across teams. No orphaned accounts accumulating for months.
This eliminates the security window that manual processes create. You also stop paying for unused licenses immediately. At scale, proper identity management can reduce software spending by 15-20%.
Most enterprise SaaS platforms support standard provisioning protocols like SCIM. Integration is straightforward. For applications without native support, identity providers offer connectors or API-based provisioning.
Why This Architecture Enables Growth
Identity and access management directly impacts three outcomes that determine start-up survival.
Capital Efficiency
Every orphaned account wastes money. Every manual provisioning hour costs engineering time that could be spent building product. Automated deprovisioning recovers wasted license costs immediately while freeing operations teams to focus on strategic work rather than account administration.
Enterprise Sales
When pursuing contracts with financial services firms, healthcare organizations, or government agencies, procurement teams demand evidence. Can you show audit logs of administrative actions? Can you prove access revokes within 24 hours of termination? Without proper IAM, enterprise deals don’t close. With it, security becomes a competitive advantage that accelerates sales cycles.
Regulatory Compliance
GDPR requires appropriate technical measures protecting personal data, explicitly including access controls limiting who can view customer information. The ICO investigates breaches where former employees accessed data months after departure. ISO 27001 certification mandates documented access control procedures. Cyber Essentials requires MFA and user access management. None of this works without proper identity architecture.
Building Access Architecture That Scales
The time to implement identity and access management is now. While your team is small enough that migration remains manageable.
Start by selecting a cloud identity provider appropriate for your scale and budget. Configure single sign-on for your core applications. Define roles matching your organizational structure and implement role-based access controls.
Enable multi-factor authentication across all accounts. Make it mandatory within 30 days. Integrate your HR system to automate provisioning and deprovisioning. Then conduct quarterly access reviews to catch any gaps.
Cardonet helps start-ups implement IAM architecture that scales from seed stage through Series B and beyond. We design systems aligned with your growth trajectory. We implement automated provisioning that keeps pace with hiring velocity. We ensure your access controls meet investor and customer security expectations.
Whether you’re preparing for technical due diligence, pursuing enterprise clients, or trying to stop manually provisioning accounts, we build identity architecture that enables growth rather than constraining it.
Ready to implement access controls that scale with quarterly team doubling? Contact Cardonet for a free identity and access management assessment tailored to fast-growing start-ups.
Your access architecture determines whether you can demonstrate proper governance during investor due diligence, whether enterprise prospects see mature security controls or concerning gaps, and whether former employees still have access to customer data six months after leaving. The question isn’t whether proper IAM matters. The question is whether you’ll implement it before or after your next funding round stalls because investors see chaos instead of architecture.
Protect your start-up. Build access controls that scale. Contact Cardonet today.
FAQs: Identity and Access Management for Start-ups
What is identity and access management (IAM)?
IAM is the security architecture that controls who can access which systems and data within your organization. This typically happens through centralized authentication via single sign-on, role-based permissions that scale with team growth, and automated lifecycle management that provisions access on day one and revokes it immediately upon departure. Proper IAM prevents unauthorized access while enabling rapid onboarding as your start-up scales from 20 to 200 employees.
Why do start-ups need IAM architecture early?
Start-ups using 50+ SaaS tools without centralized IAM face uncontrolled access sprawl where nobody can answer who has access to customer data. Orphaned accounts from departed employees pile up, creating security vulnerabilities and wasting tens of thousands annually on unused licenses. Early IAM implementation prevents security gaps that block enterprise sales and raise red flags during investor due diligence.
How does single sign-on improve security?
SSO centralizes authentication through one identity provider protected by strong credentials and MFA, eliminating password reuse across 50+ tools. When someone leaves, you disable one account and they immediately lose access to GitHub, AWS, Slack, your CRM, and every integrated application – not 47 separate manual revocations. This architectural shift delivers immediate security benefits while creating unified audit logs that show who accessed what and when across your entire SaaS ecosystem.
What are orphaned accounts and why do they matter?
Orphaned accounts belong to former employees who still have system access because deprovisioning wasn’t automated or completed. Nearly half of organizations take over seven days to fully de-provision former employees, creating security vulnerabilities that attackers exploit. These accounts waste capital on unused SaaS licenses while providing legitimate credentials that bypass perimeter security. Nobody monitors login patterns for users who left three months ago, making them invisible attack vectors.
How does role-based access control scale with growth?
RBAC assigns permissions by organizational role rather than by individual, so your 50th engineer automatically inherits the same appropriate access as your 10th without manual configuration. You define roles once – software engineer, senior engineer, sales representative – and each role carries predefined permissions across your tool stack. This reduces administrative overhead while implementing least-privilege access and creating clear audit logs essential for meeting GDPR, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 requirements.
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