Enterprise security depends on controlling who has access to what—and for how long. But most apps—whether SaaS, legacy, or homegrown—don’t support APIs or SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management). Without these integration standards, identity and access management (IAM) and identity governance (IGA) solutions can’t enforce security policies or automate lifecycle management, leaving a critical gap in protection.
This creates a category of “disconnected apps” that exist outside of centralized security controls. IT teams are left to manually provision and deprovision users, relying on custom scripts, help desk tickets, and complex workflows to manage access. The more manual the process, the greater the risk. A recent Ponemon report found that 53% of organizations have suffered a breach due to the inability to secure access to disconnected apps, and 68% of breaches are caused by human error.
Yet, despite the clear risks, SCIM and API adoption remains low. IT teams are stuck with manual processes that are slow, costly, and increasingly unsustainable in an era where automation is essential for enterprise security.
Role of SCIM in provisioning and deprovisioning users
SCIM is an API-based integration standard designed to streamline identity lifecycle management, primarily for cloud-based apps. It provides a uniform way for identity providers (IdPs) like Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, and Ping Identity to communicate with apps, automatically provisioning and deprovisioning users based on role changes, terminations, or policy updates.
By enabling SCIM, companies can:
- Instantly create and update user accounts across all connected apps
- Automate offboarding so that former employees or contractors don’t retain access
- Reduce IT workload by eliminating manual provisioning and access removal tasks
But SCIM has a major limitation: most apps don’t support it.
According to industry research, over 90% of enterprise apps lack native SCIM support or don’t offer security APIs for access management. Without these standards, IT teams are left filling the gaps with manual processes that don’t scale—wasting time, increasing costs, and exposing the organization to unnecessary risk.
What happens if you don’t use SCIM?
Without automated identity lifecycle management processes, organizations face cascading challenges that extend far beyond IT.
Security risks of manual provisioning & deprovisioning
When user access isn’t updated dynamically, permissions stack up. Employees hold onto access they no longer need, and over time, small oversights turn into major security gaps. Dormant accounts, excessive privileges, and outdated permissions create easy entry points for unauthorized access, whether from external threats or insider misuse.
The problem gets worse when companies lack structured user offboarding processes. Accounts often stay active long after employees leave or change roles, giving former employees, contractors, or bad actors an open door into critical systems. Deprovisioning apps without SCIM means IT teams are left scrambling to revoke access manually—often missing accounts entirely. The result? Increased security risks, compliance failures, and a growing attack surface.
Operational challenges for IT teams
For every disconnected app, IT must manually track and update user access. Research shows that IT teams spend an average of 7 hours provisioning and 8 hours deprovisioning access per employee, adding up to thousands of hours per year. The result? IT is bogged down in low-value admin work instead of focusing on strategic initiatives.
The inefficiencies escalate as companies expand, onboard new employees, or restructure teams—a never-ending cycle of joiners, movers, and leavers that IT struggles to keep up with.
Compliance and audit risks
Regulatory frameworks like SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 require organizations to enforce strict access control policies, log access events, and prove that former employees no longer have access to company systems. But when organizations are left to deprovision without SCIM, audit trails become fragmented or nonexistent. If apps don’t have APIs and aren’t connected to an identity governance tool, IT teams lose centralized visibility into user access and identity data.
Can provisioning and deprovisioning be automated without SCIM?
For years, enterprises have tried to work around the SCIM limitation by:
- Tracking user access in spreadsheets—a manual, high-risk, and unscalable solution.
- Developing custom scripts and workflows—which require constant maintenance, a patchwork of systems, and introduce security risks.
- Using IT service management tools like ServiceNow or Jira—a slow and reactive approach that adds friction and delays execution.
- Leveraging public APIs from various SaaS app vendors—but with no standardization across platforms, managing provisioning at scale remains fragmented and inconsistent.
The bottom line? Traditional solutions don’t fully solve the problem of disconnected apps.
How Cerby simplifies non-SCIM app lifecycle management
Cerby takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of forcing companies to rebuild their apps or identity infrastructure, we integrate with existing tools and extend SCIM-like automation to disconnected apps—without requiring APIs, costly integrations, or manual workarounds.
With Cerby, organizations achieve:
- Seamless IAM and IGA integration – Automatically synchronize user groups and permissions from your identity tools to keep access up to date.
- Automated provisioning and deprovisioning for disconnected apps – Eliminate manual processes, reducing security risks and IT workload.
- Consistent application of access controls – Enforce governance policies across all apps, reducing security gaps.
- Centralized user management for disconnected apps – A unified console for full control and easy administration.
- Enhanced visibility – Consolidate fragmented identity data across systems, simplifying audits, access reviews, and compliance reporting.
For enterprises, the impact is immediate. Security risks decrease, IT workloads shrink, compliance becomes easier to maintain, and unnecessary integration costs disappear. ClickUp, a leading productivity platform, partnered with Cerby to securely integrate their disconnected apps into their identity perimeter. With Cerby, they eliminated manual lifecycle management tasks, achieving a 97% reduction in time spent managing user access and 258% ROI.
Getting started with Cerby
SCIM was designed to make lifecycle management seamless, but its effectiveness is limited by adoption rates. The reality is that most apps won’t support SCIM or APIs anytime soon. Rather than waiting for the industry to catch up, security leaders need solutions that work today.
Cerby closes this gap, delivering identity lifecycle management for non-SCIM-enabled apps—securing the entire enterprise ecosystem, no app left behind. If you’d like to see our technology in action, book a demo today.
The challenges of disconnected apps aren’t going away, but with the right technology, they no longer have to be a security risk.
