Moving IAM from manual response to instant breach containment with Shared Signals

Imagine this: it’s Friday afternoon. You’re starting to wind down when your Slack lights up. A breach has just been discovered—maybe not in your company, but in a vendor, partner, or cloud provider. Your CISO wants answers. Your team springs into action. And your heart rate spikes because you know what’s coming: the long weekend is gone, and the real work is just beginning.

This is still the reality for many security teams today.

Despite all the investments we’ve made—identity governance (IGA), privileged access management (PAM), endpoint detection and response—we still rely on outdated, manual playbooks when something goes wrong. We scramble to figure out where the affected users have access, hunt down stale entitlements, and yank access based on best guesses because waiting for certainty might take too long.

The truth is, when an identity-related incident happens, time is your enemy. Every minute counts. But until recently, most IAM systems haven’t been designed to help you act at that speed.

That’s changing—with shared signals.

Shared signals let you respond in real-time

At Identiverse 2025, I walked through a new way of thinking about incident response—one that treats identity as a real-time system, not a slow-moving administrative process.

With shared signals, your IAM platform can receive trusted, standardized alerts from other systems. These alerts—known in the industry as Continuous Access Evaluation Profile (CAEP) signals—can indicate changes in risk posture, incident activity, or even threat detection outcomes. The power of shared signals is that your systems are notified and real time, so they can act.

Let’s take a concrete example.

Say your endpoint detection tool flags a user’s device as compromised. A CAEP signal is issued. At the exact same moment, your security team is getting paged, your access control system receives that signal and immediately:

Terminates any active sessions, revokes elevated privileges, and sends an alert to
your SIEM

All of that happens without needing to wait for a human to intervene.

That’s not just faster. That’s smarter.

From human playbooks to event-driven automation

So much of traditional IAM is reactive. It’s based on human timelines, driven by quarterly reviews, annual certifications, and post-mortem investigations. We assume someone will eventually look at that access entitlement and decide if it still makes sense. But in a breach scenario, “eventually” is a risk.

Shared signals enable a shift to continuous, event-based IAM, where real-time context drives real-time decisions.

If an incident occurs, and your IAM system knows the user involved, what access they currently have, what systems are affected, and whether the risk posture has changed—then it can act automatically to reduce your blast radius. Not in a few days, not after an email thread and a ticket, but right now.

The best part? You already have many of the pieces: your SIEM, your EDR, your identity provider, and your identity governance tools. Most of these can already publish or consume CAEP-style signals. What’s been missing is a way to use those signals to enforce policy in real-time.

That’s where SGNL comes in.

Start with the policy you want

In my Identiverse talk, I asked the audience to change how they approach their next IAM project. Don’t start with a tool or the latest compliance checkbox. Start with the policy you actually want to enforce.

For example:

“If a user is assigned an active support ticket and their risk is low, they can access production.”

Then layer in conditions:

- But only during their shift
- Only from a managed device
- Only if they’re still part of the support team

SGNL evaluates this kind of contextual policy in real-time. We continuously assess whether the conditions still hold. If something changes—ticket closed, risk score spikes, device posture degrades—we pull access instantly.

This isn’t theoretical. In a Fortune 50 enterprise, SGNL helped a team move from 30,000 static IAM role assignments to just six contextual policies. That’s not just more secure—it’s dramatically easier to manage. They saved over 100 hours per quarter on access reviews and achieved Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) across 150 AWS accounts.

All by starting with the policy they actually wanted and letting shared signals drive enforcement.

IAM that grows with you, not against you

A lot of teams feel stuck. You’ve invested in identity governance, access management, and compliance reporting, but you’re still reacting too slowly. Still firefighting. Still waiting for that quarterly review to clean up what should’ve been handled days ago.

At SGNL, we help teams shift from “IAM stuck” to “IAM unstuck.” You don’t have to throw out what you’ve built. You just need to take the first step toward a continuous, contextual model.

That step can be as simple as identifying your next IAM initiative and asking:

- What if this decision could be automated?
- What conditions need to be met to grant access?
- What context would I need for these conditions?
- What signal would let me know when something has changed?

You’d be surprised how often the answer is: you already have that signal—you’re just not using it yet.

It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being ready.

In security, perfection is a myth. The goal isn’t to predict every breach—it’s to limit the damage when it happens, to act fast, to act smart, and to remove standing privileges before they become standing liabilities.

Shared signals make that possible.

They let you collapse the gap between knowing something’s wrong and doing something about it. And they bring IAM into the real-time, risk-aware, event-driven world that the rest of security is already operating in.

So if you’re feeling stuck, don’t aim for perfection. Aim for progress.

Take the first step. caep.dev has a wealth of resources you can leverage, or contact our team to talk with an expert to help you get started.