Why a global identity strategy requires local governance
For years, identity has been treated as a supporting function, authenticating users, gating access, and satisfying audit requirements. Important, but rarely foundational.
That era is over.
In modern enterprises, identity has become the infrastructure on which critical systems depend. Every workload, certificate, API, automated process, and AI-driven action must rely on identity to operate safely and predictably.
When identity fails, those systems become exposed—and often stop behaving as expected. Operations slow, automations halt, and trust erodes before teams can determine why.
Many organizations have already felt this exposure, usually during an outage, audit, or post-incident review, when identity suddenly became the thing everyone was talking about.
Which brings us to the fundamental issue: to be successful, an identity strategy should be applied globally, yet identity governance must be applied locally to an increasingly complex range of use cases.
The core tension: strategy vs. scrutiny
Most organizations understand that identity security must modernize. Far fewer understand where modernization breaks down. The distinction that matters lies between global and regional control and the deeper tension between strategy and scrutiny.
An identity strategy defines intent, establishing how trust should operate. This includes how identities are created, governed, automated, and revoked at scale. Strategy sets the destination.
Identity governance, however, determines whether that strategy survives contact with reality. Governance answers different questions: What must be proven? To whom? Under what scrutiny? And at what moment, whether during routine operations or failure conditions?
When placed under the microscope, governance is where otherwise sound strategies can fracture.
If we look at this another way:
- Strategy can be global.
- Scrutiny is always local.
Identity strategy elements that must stay global
Certain elements of identity must remain consistent across an organization, regardless of geography.
A shared trust model defines how identities are validated and authorized. Treating identity as infrastructure ensures it’s engineered for reliability rather than convenience. Automation principles reduce dependence on manual intervention and exception-driven processes. Clear accountability establishes ownership for how identities—human, AI agent, and machine—are governed throughout their lifecycles.
Without global coherence, identity strategies become fragmented and brittle. Teams lose the ability to reason about access, risk accumulates quietly, and failures become more difficult to explain when scrutiny arrives.
But coherence alone doesn’t survive scrutiny. Which is why organizations discover that while strategy can be standardized, governance cannot.
Why identity governance can’t be uniform across systems
While teams can design a global identity strategy, they can’t do the same with governance.
Scrutiny differs by region, accountability by regulator, and expectations vary by market.
These differences carry real operational consequences, shaping what effective governance must deliver in practice.
What must be demonstrated in one jurisdiction may be insufficient, or even irrelevant, in another. The same control may look sound on paper, yet fail under local examination because it cannot produce the proper evidence at the right time to the appropriate authority.
Machine identities and the need for local governance
For many organizations, this tension becomes most visible in the era of machine identities. Machine identity security exposes the limits of global strategy by removing the assumptions on which governance was built.
Machines now outnumber humans in enterprise environments. Automation removes discretion and pause. Actions occur continuously and across borders. Increasingly, machines initiate actions, authenticate other systems, and operate with delegated authority.
Governance must function without interpretation, exception, or human mediation.
This convergence of machine volume, variety, and velocity puts global identity strategies to the real test. When machines exceed humans as an organization’s dominant actors, identity controls must hold under real scrutiny, in real time, and in the specific jurisdiction where failures occur.
Local governance under machine scrutiny
Machine-driven identity brings the tension between global strategy and local governance into full view, especially when regulators examine automated access and control. The impact of scrutiny depends on where the activity occurs, as each region applies its own expectations, evidence requirements, and accountability standards. The following regional examples illustrate how these differences shape governance in practice.
Key factors that differ across regions include:
- Evidence is required to demonstrate control
- Accountability is assigned during disruption and recovery
ANZ: Resilience under disruption
In Australia and New Zealand, identity governance is shaped by baseline control expectations and resilience accountability, driven by frameworks such as ASD Essential Eight and APRA CPS 230. When machine identities fail during disruption, the issue is treated as an operational resilience failure rather than a security gap, with board-level accountability.
Regulatory scrutiny in practice:
Regulators increasingly test whether automated identities can be revoked during an outage without impairing recovery or continuity obligations.
Canada: Evidence and traceability
In Canada, identity governance is evaluated through operational and legal lenses, led by OSFI guidance and privacy obligations under PIPEDA. Machine identities sit at the crossroads of these demands, which means automated access must be attributable, reconstructable, and tied to accountable ownership.
Regulatory scrutiny in practice:
Supervisory reviews increasingly ask whether an AI agent’s actions can be reconstructed months later and attributed to a specific workload identity, rather than a shared service account.
Europe: Lawful access and operational continuity
In Europe, identity governance is defined by the intersection of data protection and resilience, anchored by GDPR and DORA. Machine identities amplify both risks. Automated workloads must maintain lawful access to personal data while remaining controllable and recoverable in the event of disruption.
Regulatory scrutiny in practice:
Organizations are increasingly required to demonstrate that automated access to personal data remains lawful and auditable, even during cross-border failover events.
Asia: Precision in one market, scale in another
Across Asia, governance pressure diverges sharply, even among mature markets. In Singapore, accountability and auditability are emphasized under the Personal Data Protection Act. At the same time, India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act applies similar principles on a massive scale across highly interconnected ecosystems. Machine identities expose the contrast between precision and volume.
Regulatory scrutiny in practice:
Regulators expect automated access to scale without collapsing accountability, exposing the limits of static credentials and poorly governed service identities.
Across every region, the pattern is consistent. Global identity strategies define how automation is expected to work, and local governance determines whether teams can defend machine-driven activity when scrutiny arrives.
The end state: designing for both
Today’s most effective identity security programs are designed for coherence and enforceability, not “one-size-fits-all” uniformity.
Global coherence provides a shared trust model, consistent automation principles, and a common understanding of accountability. Local enforceability ensures that identity controls can withstand scrutiny where they actually occur.
That means governance is embedded by design and relies on exception management only in rare circumstances, and successful organizations embrace both global strategy and local governance from the outset.
The leadership imperative
In the modern enterprise, accountability for identity governance extends beyond technical teams to leadership.
When viewed through this lens, identity governance helps organizations determine how to absorb disruption, respond to scrutiny, and maintain trust at scale. Leaders who recognize its importance build systems that operate quietly, predictably, and defensibly—enforcing tailored controls across varying regions, systems, and business demands.
Those who don’t tend to relearn the lesson publicly, and usually at the worst possible moments.
The difference only becomes visible under closer examination, where governance is designed with intent and enforced with context.
Nick Curcuru is a director in the CyberArk Trust Office.
