The hidden cost of doing nothing about machine identities

It’s one thing to ignore a risk because you’re unaware of it. It’s another to ignore it because dealing with it sounds like a hassle. When it comes to machine identities—service accounts, bots, RPAs, and more—many organizations fall into the latter category. They know there’s a problem. They just don’t know where to start.

Unfortunately, attackers do.

Attackers are already exploiting machine identities

In early 2025, a major multinational retailer confirmed a data breach where attackers gained access via stolen credentials—including those tied to machine accounts. This isn’t an isolated incident. In breach after breach, attackers exploit the same weakness: unmanaged, unmonitored, and unowned machine identities.

And it’s no wonder. According to recent research by SailPoint, 57% of organizations report that inappropriate access has been granted to at least one machine identity.

Why? Because machines don’t log in from new devices. And no one notices when they’re abused... until it’s too late.

Doing nothing doesn’t just cost you security...it costs you money

While the security risk of unmanaged machine identities is obvious, the financial burden is often overlooked. The longer you wait to address the sprawl, the more bloated and expensive your environment becomes.

Each orphaned or unmanaged machine account represents unnecessary cost:

• You're paying for the infrastructure those identities touch—storage, processing, access.
• You’re funding the headcount to manually investigate them.
• You’re assuming greater audit risk, which translates to longer, costlier remediation efforts.

And if a machine account is compromised, the financial impact multiplies—incident response, downtime, reputational damage, and in many cases, regulatory penalties.

Delay is expensive...even if nothing bad happens

Even if you avoid an incident, the cost of waiting is still real. Machine identity cleanup becomes more complex and more expensive with time. One SailPoint customer learned this the hard way. They attempted a manual cleanup and reduced their machine account footprint by 20–40%. But it took months of human hours, meetings, spreadsheets, and firefighting.

That’s time they’ll never get back. And that’s why they ultimately invested in Machine Identity Security: to make sure they never had to go through that again.

How SailPoint helps you reduce cost and risk

SailPoint’s Machine Identity Security solution is built specifically to help you reduce both risk and cost. Here’s how we do it:

Discover every machine identity. Most organizations uncover far more than expected. Doing this manually takes weeks—our automated discovery does it in minutes. That’s real labor cost avoided.

Assign owners. Ownership is the first step toward accountability. Our platform helps identify and assign the right person to each machine account, reducing time wasted chasing down responsibility.

Certify access. Is the account still needed? Does it have excessive permissions? Our certification engine makes it easy to validate access regularly, cutting down on audit costs and surprises.

Safely reduce your footprint. For accounts with no owner, we support “rolling brownouts”: turn it off for 15 minutes, then 30, then 60. If no one complains, it likely wasn’t needed.

When organizations follow this approach, the result is significant: fewer machine accounts, less operational drag, and a smaller attack surface.

That means fewer identities to manage, fewer credentials to protect, and fewer entry points for attackers.

And it means real, measurable savings:

• Less time spent manually chasing down accounts
• Lower infrastructure and licensing costs for unused access
• Reduced effort during audits and fewer compliance gaps

The choice is simple

You can continue doing nothing and keep paying for unused, ungoverned, and vulnerable machine access. But that cost adds up, whether it’s visible on a balance sheet or buried in resource strain, audit prep, and security exposure.

Doing nothing is the most expensive option of all.

Watch the webinar Unified Platform: Securing Third-Party and Machine Identities to see how leading organizations are managing machine (and third-party) identities efficiently—and why it’s time to stop ignoring the machines.