Fortanix for Venafi

As businesses transition online in a bid to streamline day-today management and operations, there has been an explosion of machines – from physical machines, such as servers and PCs, to mobile devices, applications, cloud instances, containers, microservices, clusters, APIs and smart algorithms.

And all these machines, like humans, have identities that need to be managed.

Research from the non-profit Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA) found that 83% of companies saw an increase in the number of identities accessing system resources in the past year.

As organizations continue to chalk out safe and efficient ways of running their services in the new global paradigm, machine identities are slated to grow significantly in the coming years.

Getting machine identity management right is pivotal to safe communications—in-turn creating a greater dependency on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificates and cryptographic key pairs.

But given the sheer volume of keys and certificates coupled with shorter lifecycles, managing machine identities manually can turn out to be a slow, errorprone, and highly inefficient process.

On the contrary, having a proper strategy and technology solution can mitigate the operational overhead and the overall room for error.

Given how these machine identities are often unique to each device—managing them manually is tough feat to achieve. Then there are secrets, tokens, cryptographic keys like SSH, and a slew of other IAM credentials to be managed and secured—often susceptible to expiration, revocation, or mismanagement when managed manually.

Automating machine identity management is the only answer.