More than 60 percent of organizations don’t hold full awareness of certificates and keys across their digital assets, according to new research from AppViewX, a leader in secure machine identity management and application delivery automation.
During the pandemic, as enterprises were forced to accelerate their digital transformation efforts, The Next-Gen Machine Identity Management Report, suggests many organizations also became unable to track the identities of all machines across their evolving IT networks.
Of the enterprises that lacked certificate and key awareness, 96 percent experienced consequences that could cripple their operations, including cybersecurity breaches (55 percent), loss of employee productivity (47 percent), system outages due to lack of complete visibility (35 percent) and financial losses from outages (33 percent).
Despite this, an overwhelming majority of organizations recognize the importance of improving and investing in machine identity management. According to the research, almost all the IT and security leaders surveyed (99 percent) reported their organizations are likely to start taking the steps needed to overcome these issues by enhancing their machine identity management approach, but these leaders (98 percent) also expect to face challenges. Some of the major hurdles that have prevented executive team buy-in include:
The complexity of managing certificates across all areas of IT infrastructure (67 percent)
- Lack of skill sets within IT/security teams (66 percent)
- Current management is manual and too time consuming to upgrade (57 percent)
- Budget constraints (49 percent)
These specific challenges indicate a need for solutions which can be provisioned across the entire IT infrastructure, and can be implemented easily, even where skillsets are lacking.
According to Gartner Hype Cycle for Identity and Access Management Technologies 2021, “Digital transformation has led to an explosion in the number of machines — such as workloads, code, applications and containers — that need to identify themselves and communicate with each other. As a result, several technology providers have built tools that can help clients discover and manage machine identities across hybrid and multicloud environments. Managing machine identities has become critical, as nonhuman entities are now at the leading edge of digital transformation.”
Looking to the future, organizations are taking steps to upgrade to the next generation of machine identity management tools. The majority is planning, or has already begun, to implement automated machine identity management workflows (96 percent); taken the steps to manage certificate lifecycles on hybrid deployment models (95 percent); or adopted machine identity management-as-a-service (95 percent).
Of the forward-looking enterprises that have already implemented a machine identity management solution, The Next-Gen Machine Identity Management Report shows a number of benefits are being experienced as a result. Some benefits include:
- More awareness of certificates and keys across new and emerging technologies (54 percent)
- An increased ability to access certificates and keys faster (51 percent)
- Stronger security credentials (51 percent)
- A reduction in the likelihood of outages due to certificate expiry or human error (41 percent)
For information about AppViewX’s PKI and Certificate Management Tools, which were recognized by Gartner in the “Solution Comparison for PKI and Certificate Management Tools” report, visit appviewx.com.
