The Traditional IT Model Is Broken. Here’s What Replaces It

InnovationThe Traditional IT Model Is Broken. Here’s What Replaces ItByCasey Carlton,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 13, 2026, 09:15am EDTCasey Carlton is Head of Technology Operations at Treeline, an a16z-backed company transforming the managed services industry. getty​A decade of building IT orgs at high-growth startups taught me that the problem is almost never what executives think it is.​​The first thing I did when I joined one of my previous companies was audit the SaaS environment. The company had fewer than 300 employees. What I found was over 400 active SaaS applications—most of them redundant, many of them unowned and almost none of them centrally managed. Nobody knew what they were paying for. Nobody knew who had access to what. And nobody, until that moment, had thought to ask.That’s not unusual. That’s the norm.At every company I’ve built IT for, the pattern is the same: IT is treated as a reactive function until the moment it becomes a crisis. And by then, the cleanup costs far more than prevention would have.The Ghost Access Problem Nobody Talks AboutDuring that same audit, I found something that should have kept the executive team up at night: former employees and contractors still had admin-level access to critical infrastructure—months, in some cases, after they’d left the company. Salesforce. AWS. Code repos. Financial systems. People who had moved on to competitors. People the company had parted with on difficult terms.This isn’t a security edge case. It’s an epidemic. The reason it happens is structural: offboarding is almost universally manual. Someone submits a ticket. Someone else processes it—eventually. In the meantime, access persists. And in a world where a single compromised credential can trigger a breach that costs millions and ends careers, “eventually” is a liability.T...