Your Identity System Is Your Biggest Single Point of Failure

Welcome to Part 2 of the **Cloud Fragility * series. In Part 1, we broke down multi-cloud cascading failures. Today, we tackle the most dangerous shared choke point in modern architecture: Identity.* The Skeleton Key Problem Over the last ten years, companies poured everything into Zero Trust. Apps moved behind SSO, conditional access rules kept multiplying, and suddenly, multi-factor authentication was everywhere. Security shot up. But resilience quietly slipped away. Companies started funneling all authentication through a single source—usually a SaaS identity provider like Okta or Microsoft Entra ID. Then they spread that authority everywhere: every cloud, every tool. This made things simple. One place to grant access, yank privileges, and check what’s going on. But now everything depends on that one spot. Right now, the same identity engine decides who gets into your AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and anything you’ve got running on-prem. Build pipelines, monitoring dashboards, finance a